In the presence of Robert Birmelin’s paintings, there is a sense of recognizing a transition from life into art, enhanced by the scale and drama of their execution and by the visual games the artist plays upon the viewer.  Attacking his canvas with zeal, Birmelin brings new meaning to the slice of life realism anticipated in the 1960s by the Pop Art movement’s response to Abstract Expressionism.  Then, as now, the subject is a fleeting view of action on the streets of Manhattan amidst crowds and teaming population.  However, somewhat like television sound bites, Birmelin presents visual snippets of life in the city, seen as fragments of perception which offer the feeling of reality rather than tie illustration of it.  The viewer occupies the artist’s position –action happens to the viewer, or threatens to do so, as the crowd presses forward. Birmelin’s recent works seem to cast off the agitation of these cityscapes approaching in his paintings of the same scale a sense of mystery and duality.  The artist’s perspective as now changed into a quieter, more voyeuristic position.  Mostly of domestic interiors, the paintings suggest a narrative that we are intended to comprehend.  Objects occupy strategic positions as if they are references to unraveling the puzzle before us; people are truncated at the periphery, making no effort to interact with the artist.  To further the sense of melodrama, the paintings disguise an alternative reading by including an inverted picture which appears to define a mystery of a different sort.  This dual nature of each painting thwarts attempts to decipher meaning, hence, the viewer is mystified and experiences a sense of awe. Enchanting his audience with voluptuous technique as well as provocative content, Birmelin employs a drawing style that is rooted in an understanding of the visual world he portrays.  For the last 23 years as Professor of Art at Queens College, Birmelin has brought to his students a reverence for the underpinnings of good drawing.  Trained at both the Cooper Union in New York and the Slade School of Art at University of London, Birmelin finished his graduate degree at Yale in 1960 where the department was influenced by Bauhaus artist Joseph Albers.  Albers’s work on the interaction of colors proposed a view of perception which altered a color merely by changing the color of the background. The twenty large works in the current exhibition were selected by the artist to demonstrate the relationship of drawing to the painted canvas.  Robert Birmelin has exhibited at more than ten college galleries, receiving numerous grants and scholarships including three National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Fulbright Scholarship.  He has recently held a major retrospective of his drawings at the Jersey City Museum and an exhibition this past fall at the Peter Findlay Gallery on 57th Street, New York.  The Lore Degenstein Gallery welcomes Robert Birmelin to Susquehanna University.   Valerie Livingston   Leaving the Court - the Photographer. Robert Birmelin. Acrylic on canvas. 1990-91. 72 x 108" Collection of the artist.