Artists often strive to reflect and organize nature. They engage in experiments to bring visual order to a world in which all notions of value, (time, light space) appear suspect. Michael Oruch’s world is ordered and organized by architectural elements. His PORTAL casts you into an immense void in which huge areas project outward. The stark vertical and horizontal lines suggest lakc of movement but the space is not static. The forms crowd each other for position while the three portals facing you extend off the picture plane. His palette is influenced by his appreciation of material objects from other cultures, particularly textiles, such as Amish quilts which have black backgrounds and sever geometrical shapes, American Indian blankets and African textiles. His subtle, luminous color emphasizes rather than obscures the contrast between architectural shapes and symbols with the absence of form.

Mark Rothko said “Moving closer to or further away from natural appearances is somewhat misleading, because I believe the paintings are concerned with that problem. We are in a sense myth makers and as such have no prejudice for or against reality. Our paintings, like all myths do not hesitate to combine shreds of reality with what is considered “unreal: and insist upon the validity of the merger. If previous abstractions paralleled the scientific and objective preoccupation of our times, ours are finding a pictorial equivalent for man’s new knowledge and consciousness of more complex inner self.”