REVIEWS

March 20, 2020
Charles Kalick builds his artwork out of wood. He uses a very limited vocabulary to say much. The limited vocabulary includes the grid as each piece is made up of smaller blocks; the colors red, white and black: patterns either painted or carved. Generally, the composition in all of these has a symmetrical quality about a center axis-one side mirroring the other. But Kalick is a first class rule breaker, it seems, even of his own rules. In “RBW5” this “consistency” relationship is clear—center block with mirrored decorative patterns above and below and from one side to side to the other. But as I move around the gallery looking at other RBW works the playfulness of Kalick’s system becomes more convoluted by flipping certain blocks and turning others and even adding more carved shapes. So, we can come to something like “RBW7” with similar pieces to “RBW5”, then to “Two Pitchers” where the repeats shift to cause an image of two pitchers with long handles that sit on a table. Ultimately “Tower”, a three-dimensional cityscape featuring a hi-rise building along the center brings this series to a delightful close. 
Other pieces are constructed in the same vein but with additions of color. “What Remains” and “Subterranean” bring to my mind the early geometric abstractions of Sean Scully, works like “Bear” and “Ridge”. Like Scully”s work, Kalick’s possesses density and physicality and a textural quality that makes me want to pass my hand over them.
Carol Taylor-Kearney, WhatsArtBlog
Cerulean Arts Gallery, Philadelphia PA

September 24, 2018
Charles Kalick makes paintings that even a blind person can enjoy-by which I mean that even an unsighted person would realize the complexity and activity of them through their texture. They are set up in a grid. And sometimes the compartmentalized color and pattern emerges from the picture plane while others recede into it. I want to touch, I want to play, I want to take it apart and piece it together myself! The color can border on the garish, but that just makes it more exuberant, rather like Sol LeWitt. But I would put Kalick more in with Sean Scully who allowed nature into his grids through the interaction of the edges of one color box to another color box. With Kalick, though, this “nature play” happens in the middle of each part through its materiality. As a whole, many of his grids are symmetrical in their set up. But then, you look and find slight differences between the “twinned” squares. My favorites are when he takes a slight step away from the symmetry by introducing another component as in “Skewbald” and “Monument”.
Carol Taylor-Kearney, WhatsArtBlog
“New Season of the Collective Experience”
Cerulean Arts Gallery, Philadelphia PA

July 5, 2012
Charles Kalick’s paintings are sculptural and grid-based; their edges are both built and drawn into paint. Colorful, textured squares and rectangles rise above or recede into the picture plane; each painting is a collection of mini-paintings assembled into a complex three-dimensional equation. Cast shadows and inconsistent edges entertain me, and I feel like I’m a kid in a cupcake parlor, it’s my birthday, and the frosted tops are iced to perfection.
Recently, Kalick has started adding sticks, stones, clay, paper-maiche, and sawdust to his paint, building even richer, slathered-on treats. Painted and etched lines inside the forms echo the actual edges, making mini-paintings within mini-paintings within the larger whole. Working in series of theme and color, the artist composes sections into pathways that direct the eye, so that unification of the whole trumps attachment to any single gem of sensual experience.
Kalick’s smooth, straight edges frame complex surfaces, signaling abrupt changes in mood and texture without calling attention to their presence.
Elizabeth Johnson, Theartblog.org
“The Edge of Geometric abstraction at TGTripp”
LGTripp Gallery, Philadelphia

June 17, 2012
The three artists who have solo shows at LGTripp Gallery have more in common than abstraction, but that is not immediately apparent because they use three different media – photography, paint and yarn – and they occupy three entirely separate spaces. In fact, all three are exploring linear forms, strong contrasts of light and dark and texture.
An arrangement of Charles Kalick’s colorful abstract paintings in what is arguably the most difficult space in the gallery – the long hallway that connects the front and back exhibition spaces – looks wonderful here in isolation against a crisp white wall. The bright yellows, blues and pinks animating Kalick’s compositions of rectangles pop out from the wall, and it’s nice to be able to see his rich surface textures easily from the side as well as the front.
Edith Newhall, Philadelphia Inquirer Art Critic
LGTripp Gallery

October 22, 2010
Charles Kalick strikes a new expressive/decorative balancing act in his geometric abstract painting show “Division”. Compartmentalized pockets of space along raised corridors of densely textured surfaces favor a limited range of boldly contrasted color. Linear scaffolding derived ultimately from cubism as it developed during the emergence of modern painting now has joined with luxuriantly sensual effects learned from the primitive. These shape a true identity in a positive way.
Victoria Donohoe, Philadelphia Inquirer Art Critic
“Division” – Sande Webster Gallery

December 12, 2008
Kalick paints geometric patterns in radiant colors thickly applied in straight, ropy lines resembling woven fabric. There's a liveliness in this work giving it an extra level of maturity, and Kalick's sizzling colors have a sensuous quality. So full of texture is the work that we soon want to give up looking for clues to meaning here and just get lost in it. Yet, Kalick's focus on small rectangles assumes a totemic importance.
Victoria Donohoe, Philadelphia Inquirer Art Critic
“Push Pull” – Sande Webster Gallery

June 30, 2007
“Stranded – Dockside”, by Charles Kalick is another “Best in Show.” The surface paint strokes have the texture of raffia against a multi-colored background, with an abstract, patterned center rectangle in brilliant, thick, narrow lines of paint.
Anne R. Fabbri, Broad Street Review
Way Center’s “Out Loud and Proud”

January 2, 1998
“Charles Kalick, one of the painters in the Art Alliance exhibition, has a solo show around the corner at Mangel Gallery. It consists of a new series of paintings that appear to be inspired by flowers and other types of vegetation, although the boundary between representation and imagination is often indistinct.
Kalick’s abstraction is the kind that results when an artist extrapolates from nature until he or she reaches that boundary. Sometimes he crosses it, sometimes he only straddles it, as in one painting in which bunches of grapes are readily identifiable.
Kalick’s paintings, acrylics on museum board are exuberant and chromatically intense. The series is painted mostly in pink, orange, yellow and black. Such high-key colors, combined with a profusion of densely packed forms that suggest the fecundity of nature, give the paintings a shimmering vibrancy.
Some of them are also a little goofy, like Philip Guston’s late work. Like Guston’s paintings, they’re very likable – no hard edges, no angst. Kalick wants his audience to feel nature’s lushness and the sensuousness of organic excess. In this show, one can’t escape from either.”
Edward J. Sozanski, Philadelphia Inquirer Art Critic
Mangel Gallery

 March 17, 1995
“The new paintings by Charles Kalick at Mangel Gallery establish a playful organic rhythm through a simple compositional strategy, the bunching of vertical elements that are vaguely anthropomorphic. In this regard, the paintings create energy out of improbable materials, somewhat like sculptures by Louise Nevelson.
The paintings, in acrylic on museum board, are quite large and executed in a warm palette with strong blue and black contrasts. Their imagery isn’t very substantial – just a series of bulbous and curvilinear forms and poles with ladder-like hatching.
They’re less allusions to natural forms trhan expressions of vitality, rather like exotic plants. They recall the biomorphic inventions of early surrealism, things like nature but not of it. The 10 pictures in this series are of a piece, and as an ensemblee they create a flow of movement around the gallery. It’s like being in the midst of a garden bursting with life, but where nothing is familiar.”
Edward J. Sozanski, Philadelphia Inquirer Art Critic
Mangel Gallery

 March 15, 1985
“Charles Kalick’s new work at the Locks Gallery tends toward graphic exposition without relinquishing its painterly quality. The artist’s large canvases have overtones of a somewhat linear cubism and are richly surfaced and full of rude energy. And in Kalick’s works on paper, done with more of a small-sketch sensibility, still life is cast in a new order. These paperwork images suggest a group of sculptures assembled ornamentally. In such pictures there’s a hint of funkiness, with a milder sense of form and of humor.”
Victoria Donohoe, Philadelphia Inquirer Art Critic
Locks Gallery

1983
“The award winning entry by Charles Kalick of Marian Locks Gallery is strong and appealing, if trendy in it’s combination of patterning and primitivist echos.”
Victoria Donohoe, Philadelphia Inquirer Art Critic
Cheltenham Art Center