The Paintings of Dolores Greco
What does one say about Dolores Greco's paintings?
After a recent visit to her studio, Dolores asked me if I could write a little something about her work. How do you write about a non-linguistic activity using words?
What I see in Dolores's paintings are their struggle with not knowing, and this is not knowing is, I think, important to all artists working in abstraction. These paintings are not illustrations, not representations, they are in essence performances. And each performance is an exercise in understanding certain kinds of physical, emotional and formal relations. To me, these paintings are about the courage to start from nothing, with no map to guide you to end up in a place you had no idea of arriving at. The journey involves grappling with the materials at hand, dealing with the resistance of those same materials, the mistakes made, the constant changes to correct them, and the numerous choices that can be made. With each step forward and new decision.
In the end, after seeing the results of these journeys, all I can say is That Dolores Greco's paintings wear all of those painterly decisions honestly, and beautifully on their sleeves.
Richard Mongiat, March 2025