In many paintings by D’Vorzon I see the ghost of Jackson Pollock twisting all over her style. In other isolated paintings, one can still identify something more than coincidental references to Hofmann and Kline and her old friend and mentor Willem De Kooning. But D’Vorzon is not an Abstract Expressionist. Although because she found her wings on the cusp of that movement, she is the legitimate inheritor of that tradition, and as such, she is really the first to take its essentials to the next logical phase. As Pollock and Kline were the fulfillment of the ideas of Kandinsky, D’Vorzon is the reformulation of the impulses of Pollock and Kline. With a certain brand of self-serving interests that every great artist must possess, D’Vorzon rescued what she needed, salvaged what she wanted, changed what she had to, and tossed the rest away.

Berenice D’Vorzon’s Experientialist Art has made me believe all over again that there just may be such a thing as a great leap forward. While all the boys were busy banging and pounding on those redoubtable Huxleyan doors, Berenice figured maybe it would take a woman to sort of coax them open. And she did. And what she saw behind them is spectacular and formidable.

Joe Vojtko