review by Max Reif

     Keith Moldenbach's "Mystery and Connectedness" delivers strongly on its title. Keith has an observant and playful eye, which deconstructs the physical world deftly and often deliciously.

     The art of photography has much to do with knowing how to frame what the viewer sees so as to bring him or her some kind of revelation. I had many such "aha" experiences viewing these twenty-two photos. In the few cases that did not leave such a sense of enrichment, I simply felt the theme repetitive. Had I had more time to ponder, something I didn't catch within my time constraints may well have jumped out.

     The subjects of most of Keith's photos in this show are, ostensibly, juxtaposed skyscrapers in downtown San Francisco. Even an amateur photographer sees in our great cities striking contrasts of elements such as "the old and the new". Keith makes nice use of this contrast, but in addition he plays with light and shadow, space, dimension, up and down, shape, reflection, and such ideas as "illusion and reality" in very effective and pleasing ways.

     The other pieces in the exhibit depict mysterious views from the window of a house or garage. A couple of them embody the theme of "frames within frames" in, I feel, quite a masterful way.

     I once spent a morning in the vast Abstract Expressionism room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and discovered there the joys of abstract art. Paintings by Hoffman, Pollack, and others that supposedly existed in one place in time and space began to move and create new colors, taking me on journeys that likely would have continued as long as I stayed.

     Keith certainly engages all the mysteries of abstraction in his photographic art. The difference is that he takes as his canvas the "real" physical world (which mystics call "Illusion"), gives us new eyes with which to see it, and leaves us palpably wondering what it really is, anyway. He shows us signs of an impersonal "Something" that ignores the boundaries our egos impose on our everyday vision. 

     Keith shows, as exceptional photographers do, that the physical world is as "plastic" as paint, and that art in any medium is a matter of pattern and rhythm. The real secret of art is the alchemy that can seduce ineffable Beauty into appearing within a frame--ironically freeing the viewer/reader/ listener, at least temporarily, from his/her "frame" of limitation.

     Other painters who came ot my mind as I looked at Keith's photographs were Chagall, Escher, and Picasso.
 "Mystery and Connection" will be up until March 22. The exhibit is well worth a trip to Berkeley.

If you can't get to Berkeley in the next week, here's the link to Keith's website: www.kmfineartphotog raphy.com 

Artist's Statement:  Mystery and Connectedness shows harmonious patterns of flow and balances of tension between line and form and suggests higher levels of organization than we are usually aware of. When we consider the grids of water, power, and streets which make up the infrastructure of the collective of living energies called cities, it almost seems that there is an invisible which informs and supports the visible and apparent.