Ralph was always interested in the concept of the resurrection and rebirth of Christ as he was also interested in similar concepts of reincarnation, rebirth, and the compassion of rising to the rebirth in afterlife. Many of these works were shown in major museums throughout the United States in the early 1950s as well as the Whitney Biennial of 1953. This series eventually lead to the total nonobjective color field paintings entitled Compassion I. During that time Ralph was very active with Barnett Newman, and hosted a series of talks at the Woodstock Art Association. Which included speakers such as Robert Motherwell, Ben Shahn, and Barnett Newman. In these color field paintings Ralph was trying to convey the feeling of rising to the afterlife and rebirth, “reincarnation”, and he would follow this theme through his painting for the rest of his life.

Walter Wickiser NYC 2023

Ralph Wickiser's abstract paintings from the 1950's are exemplary of that period of modernist American art; yet they also look astonishingly fresh. His great love of both materials and the act of painting is evident in the meticulously considered treatment of his surfaces, in their textures, in the balance, range and subtle modulation of colors - the elegant blues, reds shading to rose, greens, yellows, the orange burnished gold - and in many layers of glazes that give his colors their intensity and resonance, their depths. His handling of the paint alternates between thin, translucent passages which the light can penetrate and rich, heavy impaso; in some instances, the paint has been fashioned into rosette-like shapes, and abstract flowing into bas-relief. He also affixes nails, paint tubes and other painting paraphernalia to the surfaces as if to include all aspects for painting within itself. Surface, space color, light , brushwork are all subjects, as are the grid and the band which are the dominant structuring devices though more evident in some paintings than in others. Yet despite this phenomenological approach, the surface seems to dissolve into illusion, shimmering at the edges like a mirage. Some of these canvases were inspired by Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, whose mysterious, difficult colors and sharply expressive figures in the extraordinary central panel echo the sorrow and pity of the crucifixion with particular passion, particular poignancy; they then shift to more triumphant tones in other sections, juxtaposing the tragic and the joyous, the beautiful and the grotesque, the hateful and the compassionate, Ralph Wickiser's paintings would still those emotions in color and through color, share the spirit of that profoundly human drama.

--Lilly Wei
New York City, January 1996