Rez Raven is long recognized as an accomplished artist with a breadth of work spanning many mediums - print-maker, photographer, bricolage artist and, most prolifically, painter.  His latest work - a foray into what some have have coined "numb sentimentalism" - collides the aesthetics of primitive drawing and landscape kitsch.

He has been known to thrive on chance and "destructive dialectics" in his work. A highly impulsive process of layering, scratching, ripping and carving his works at mature, even polished stages is frequently adopted. The canvases are then re-figured as conflicted, mood-infested renderings following a jagged arc of inspiration over time. 

The artist, like his lost and longing figures, affirms but one stoic reality: that we merely emerge and exist, somewhere between everywhere and nowhere.

Raven's claustrophobic chromatic lairs echo the timeless human condition of being spiritual wanderers in a world fast becoming a mythical graveyard.  

Whether a metaphysical home might be rebuilt from the shimmering rubble of post-postmodern symbology seems the sardonic mystery smiling out at us from this artist's arresting, troubling new work.

- Arnold Rockman

Canadian Art Critic

"With Rez, and I have seen this happen in the studio on many occasions, the work actually begins to animate itself. It runs away with him, not the other way around."

- Zuzana Samkova