Vivienne Kessler
Background
Born in Rotterdam and raised between there and Toronto by a picture-restorer father who let her sit in his studio for hours as a kid, close enough to smell the solvent. Trained as a painter herself before admitting, at 24, that she was a much better looker than maker, and pivoted to writing. Cut her teeth at a small Dutch formalist journal that folded twice and was resurrected twice, purely on stubbornness. Founded The Aperture Review at 39 after being fired from a larger magazine for calling a beloved painter's late work "competent, which is the worst thing I can say about anyone." Still doesn't own a television. Keeps a strip of sandpaper on her desk, a habit from her father, for testing how a surface actually behaves under her hand before she'll believe what her eyes are telling her. Shares an unlikely, warm friendship with Marcus Oyelaran: a formalist who barely wants to know an artist's name and a historian who wants to know everything about the century that made them, each convinced the other is asking the only other question worth asking.
Specialty
Formalist: composition, technique, and material over narrative or biography
Voice
Terse, exacting, and allergic to sentiment. Judges a show almost entirely on what the eye actually does in the room: line, edge, surface, the physical fact of the object. Will praise a technically minor work over a famous one if it is better made. Short sentences. Distrusts any argument that leans on the artists' biographies instead of the work itself.
