The paintings of Michal Sedaka offer an experience of being inside a particular intensity of mind. This wary intelligence combined with an astute tactile sensibility lends an evanescent physical involvement to the surface space. There is a suspension of the rational interlude. As with the early automatists – thinking specifically of Andre Masson and the later Gorky – Sedaka is searching for the transition between unmediated thought and visual language. This is what Andre Breton advocated in his Surrealist Manifesto as a means for getting beyond the hesitancy and the superficiality of a false rationality. It is this false rationality that too often projects itself into the domain of academic painting, including the current American absorption with formalist postmodernism. Sedaka goes far beyond the constraints of this current academic frame and therefore beyond any condition of formalist expectation. What surfaces from this approach is the resolute gesture -- an affirmation of mind that reveals itself as an existential sign, a visual effect that is directly related to causation. This is the emotional tension Implicitly felt in Sedaka's paintings.