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 beyond the name and highly variable pictogram to which it is attached." The chaotic surfaces of Komarin's pieces create a vitality and tension between the spontaneous and the considered, the accidental and the consciously executed. It is the natural result of the artist's process based on his belief that intention and control should be totally removed from the act of painting. According to Komarin, the best paintings “paint themselves.” Using a fusion of house and oil paint, spackle, and other assorted mediums, Komarin loses himself in the act of painting, free and confident, seeing the serendipitous interaction of the conscious and unconscious. His works are not all inherently abstract, either, in his delightful, natively drawn Cakes (painted on rough paper bags), and The French Wigs (painted on canvas), Komarin places the image front and center, akin to Joe Bradley's “Superman.” The simplistic, yet beguiling Cakes sometimes lean like the Tower of Pisa, while dripped frosting showcases Komarin's playful manner and charm. According to the artist, the Cakes are a marriage between the domestic and the architectural. He credits his mother's cake baking, as well as his father's career as an architect, as the genesis for this image. While steeped in 20th century abstract philosophy, Komarin's works also connect to a new type of abstraction, described as “provisional painting,” by Raphael Rubinstein, in Art in America, and casualism in Sharon Butler's essay “The New Casualists” at Two Coats of Paint. The central idea describes “a calculated tentativeness,” “a concern with multiple forms of imperfection,” [focusing on] “the off kilter, the overtly off hand…” Like Komarin, they seek to get back to