Stacked Cakes, Short Cakes, Single Sack Cakes

“Komarin’s most successful works are serial such as Pop Art-like cake images, in which versions of a crudely outlined central image are repeated against a succession of subtle lyrical backgrounds.”

Sarah King

Art in America

“Regarded thus in cognizance of abstraction, what’s most important about Komarin’s stacked motif, i.e. the Cakes, is the way it functions as an “armature” for the act of painting. Josef Albers didn’t really have much to say about squares, but he appreciated them for the magic they allowed him to work with color. And as the title: Cake Stacked, Cornflower Blue on Creme, suggests, for Komarin too, color is entirely to the point! The ‘cake’ is a stable form, and the linear treatment of a legible image – along with the atmospheric treatment of the off white surround – allows for a different kind of balance between the painting’s two colors than if they were used in purely abstract forms such as Alber’s squares or Mark Rothko’s more nebulous hovering color fields. The blue, quantitatively less than the surrounding creme, dominates and even, so to speak, invades it, whereas in another recent treatment of the same motif: Cake Stacked, Orange on Purple, the purple ground dominates, almost sucking the orange form into its own dense ether.

In real life, a cake might be ‘death by chocolate’ or angel cake, hazelnut or lemon. Knowing that it is a cake does not really say so much about what it will be like to eat it. Likewise, each of those painted cakes has its own flavor, its own feeling. One is delicate, another imposing, still the third is tough but moody. There is no repetition beond the name and highly variable pictogram to which it is attached.”

Barry Schwabsky

New York, 2016

“Komarin’s Cakes are an unexpected marriage between the architectural and the domestic. The Cakes are painted on paper bags joined from the back. The cakes are painted from top down to bottom in one easy movement. Adjustments are made on second and third viewings. The drips take place as paint overflows the brush and allows for a free and unpredictable flow. Just as with an actual cake being iced, the drips move in their own unique ways and add an element of unpredictability to the whole.

In ‘Cake Stacked Blue’ for instance: the thick royal blue rivulets of paint suggestive of gooey icing outline the top half of a multi tiered cake. They also Serve to isolate segments of the background’s intricate tonal and gestural Orchestrations, which are rendered in both frenetic patches and translucent washes of eggshell browns, pale pinks, ochres, and cream whites.”

Sarah King

Art in America