Other paintings of note include The Drunken Satyr and The Fall of Icarus, both painted in 1998 at the age of 12. Each canvas depicts a single figure with an appropriate accompanying landscape and each picture conceptualizes the subject's personality. The former, connected to the Dionysian pantheon, is an obese prancing Silenus, half man, half goat, characterized by his lascivious and indolent manner, calling to mind the irrational elements in human behavior. Slutzker uses broad solid strokes, fluid brushing and a crisp linear contour to describe the tight muscular forms and underlying skeletal construction. His most recent canvases are painted in a less formalist style Slutzker calls crystalization.
Color becomes a tool of expression, is less monochromatic and more spectral.
The palette is used to deconstruct the figures into slashes and chips of counterpointed angles. Slutzker's influence comes from art historical sources via a rich home library and museum visits. He reveres Michelangelo but, with his strong reliance on melodramatic effects, he appears much more in debt to the Italian Mannerists and Baroque masters like Tintoretto, Tiepolo and Caravaggio. Regardless of where his work comes from it will be interesting to see where it will go. Till end December.