The interest in toxicity is a distinctive factor particular to late 20th Century experience, which contradicts the idealized world of Turner. On an intimate scale, Chesler's paintings look like encapsulated worlds. The associations one brings to them can be wide-ranging-from microscopic life to science fiction to dreams. There is no prescribed way for Chesler to fashion his paintings, and so images of translucent bush forms or hovering orbs of light remain open to interpretation.
As Chesler states, "I don't necessarily want to evoke any specific environment. I am more interested in eliciting the universal sensations of memory and nostalgia. " Although these pictures border on the ambiguous, Chesler calls them "psychic landscapes." In groupings, they form a metaphysical travelogue tracing a free-floating journey through our collective imagination. In the same way that the artists of the Hudson River school depicted their own fantastic visions of the natural world, Chesler's paintings portray the place of nature in the contemporary psyche.
Excerpt from essay by New York critic Jude Schwendenwien
