| Stephen Kasner’s work evokes the peaceful melancholy of impending violence. I have always felt this same sense of impending violence to be inherent in our culture. It is the feeling you get if you know something quite horrible is going to happen to you, but but then again maybe it won’t. Living in a country obsessed with violence, it doesn’t matter if the violence is never actually manifested. The sensation of fearing violent acts is its own form of violence. Kasner may very well be a modern Goya, as he documents our inquisitions and our social collapse. While we are busy asking ourselves what Paris Hilton is doing, Kasner is planning our escape. | 
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Steven Johnson Leyba
Stephen Kasner’s work was on view in April in the group show, Transgression, at Last Rites Gallery in New York.
Stephen Kasner, Away, 2002. Oil on canvas, 50 x 36 in. Courtesy of the artist.Stephen Kasner’s work evokes the peaceful melancholy of impending violence. I have always felt this same sense of impending violence to be inherent in our culture. It is the feeling you get if you know something quite horrible is going to happen to you, but but then again maybe it won’t. Living in a country obsessed with violence, it doesn’t matter if the violence is never actually manifested. The sensation of fearing violent acts is its own form of violence. Kasner may very well be a modern Goya, as he documents our inquisitions and our social collapse. While we are busy asking ourselves what Paris Hilton is doing, Kasner is planning our escape. He seems to tell us that there is a way out of our material obsession as global consumer citizens. The message he conveys is that the entire external world is a fraud and that our inner reality is the only one. The only things that are real are the things we personally experience. He hints at the potential breakthroughs in quantum physics and our triumph over physical reality.
There is no ego worship or artist megalomania here. Kasner’s work is a continuation of serious painting concerned with human evolution, exploration, and most importantly, truth. While modern art is slipping out of the shackles of Post-Modernism and back to the human and figurative art, Kasner remains a step ahead of the rest. You can get lost in his work because you never get distracted by how he does it. Rather the work is about subject and message. It isn’t about the process, it’s about the emanation of life itself. It is a form of animism; we are all connected by life to everything that is living. He knows that the modern world is a world designed to take us so far away from ourselves that we no longer know who we are. He is at war with people and things that tell us who we are and what we want.
When you look at a painting by Stephen Kasner forget about being entertained. Forget about the shiny-glossy-cool California kitsch paintings they are trying to sell you. Forget about the instructions of conceptual art and the atheism of Minimalism. Forget for a moment what they are telling you about what’s cool and hip, and just feel Kasner’s art. Forget about the past and envision the future—your future. Don’t think of the art of Stephen Kasner as mere paint on canvas, or product, or entertainment. Think of his art as a loving, feeling, living, breathing, thinking entity of enlightenment.
