"     Mr. Yektai's present paintings are entirely different, at least on the surface. They are abstract for the most part, depicting nature, not as a mysterious subject but as a precise experience to be enjoyed. Yet there is one quality which is similar in all of Mr. Yektai's pieces: the heartfelt feeling that is elicited when we see his works. In the past, we could connect with the implied narrative; in the present we bond with the place itself. Such a point is certainly relevant, since the spectator  ( especially this critic ) is a person who may have actually been to the paintings' locations."

"     Marbella's location on the Mediterranean Costa del Sol is a perfect place for Darius Yektai's recent exhibit at the Sholeh Abghari Gallery. However, instead of the surrounding Mediterranean Sea as a background, we have the artist's own real-life setting, the nearby ponds and fields of the Hamptons in Eastern Long Island." 

"...Yektai builds layer upon layer of paint encased in resin to be painted upon once more. Manipulating thick swathes of oil paint is the artist’s signature style, which emphasizes an illegibility in the depth of the piece; stacked in abundant pours of resin giving the work a sculptural presence. Each figure is imbued with an uncanny weight turned gravitas as the slick surface encases the subject–frozen in time–as if “a geological record”. "

Catalog for an exhibition of waterlillies at the Grenning Gallery in Sag Harbor in 2021 with essays by Lloyd Wise an Anthony Hayden Guest. 

Drive-By-Art show review

"For me the most poignant example is Tern 2, which depicts the flighty creature skimming the surface of shimmering water. The wonderful thing about the painting is the artist’s use of silver paint to represent what truly is a quicksilver moment. The shiny liquid seems to ignite as the beak of the bird breaks the surface skimming for fish."

"Here, with no pretense, we can enjoy the paintings and feel our spirits lifted in their presence."

"Darius Yektai's waves are structural, ominous paintings of mostly black, white and silver. These oils, best at their most imposing 8- foot scale, capture the action of subject and painter in thick, aggressive strokes and splashes as violent and grand as the swells and barrels they portray. The work... gives a potentially trite subject weight, movement and originality... the painter used spray paint to reflect the way waves spray and he allowed his paint to run, splash and drip as the ocean would. " it just makes sense," Yektai said, describing subject, process and material as one. "The Quality of paint describes the image."

"Brideghampton native Darius Yektai's work, on display at Tripoli Gallery, is inspired by his Sagg Pond roots... photographs by Eric Cahan"

''The surface of Yektai's painting uniformly reveals the trace of the brush. Nothing is hidden or repressed. The way the painting is constructed is entirely visible.''

''Darius Yektai subsumes the intellect in favor of the emotions... it is through this tension and balance- working from his innermost feelings- where the mythic grandeur in his work begins to take hold.''

''One might imagine figurative works to be less painterly than the landscape or certainly the abstract, but Mr. Kertess's selection defies this notion. Billy Sullivan and Darius Yektai take a figurative approach, and Mr. Yektai shares the kind of intimate and informal style portraiture that has distinguished Mr. Sullivan.''

''Darius Yektai's ingenious play with surfaces and planes in his work interjects a sense of remove and separateness to what would otherwise be a scene of passionate encounter in a bedroom.''

''In all his work, Darius Yektai involves the viewer in what might be termed an atmosphere of ''indwellingness''. His depicted spaces whether they are of a social, that is public, nature or of a more private kind allow the viewer a privileged point of access to a suffused and deepened atmosphere which has a story-telling feel to it.''

''Exploring new possibilities for combining the physical and the psychological, Darius Yektai's recent work touches on a number of contemporary ideas.''

''Yektai is at his boldest when his message and the overt physicality of his materials merge. In the large canvases, heavily pigmented, bursting figure shapes push against and challenge the notion of pictorial space.''

''...Darius views life in a contradictory fashion, his narrative paintings literally full of darkness. While his works could also be called ''painterly'', there's a somber theme to go with the silhouetted figures. We are somehow reminded of war (''The Mission'' series: the current Iraqi conflict or even the French Indian War).''

''Emphasizing this organizing principle of energy is the artist's use of collaged objects such as flattened turpenoid cans, used tubes of paint, and other detritus and autobiographical flotsam and jetsam from his studio floor. While this spurs a sense of cacophony through both visual and textural contrasts, there is also a kind of understated symphonic compositional approach that is surprisingly tender...''

''There's a lot of energy in the brushwork. The pigment is built up in some areas and the canvas is nearly bare elsewhere, so there is a constant play between thin and thick surfaces, abstraction and representation. Mr. Yektai is a purposeful painter, there isn't a subtle moment in any of these pictures, and that's a strength.''

''Although the big paintings have an attractive energy, I liked best a series of small self-portraits in whose ground of murky, coffee-colored pigment we glimpse bits of a face, fugitive highlights, way, way back in the paint... viewing Mr. Yektai's crepuscular self-portraits is like looking at Rembrandt with all the lights turned out.''

''Darius Yektai's recent paintings offer a decidedly taut surface structure that creates as much emotional tension within the works as his bold and unabashedly aggressive brush strokes. Featuring what would contextually seem essentially bucolic and even romantic themes, the compositional arrangements have an intensity that overwhelms any gentility or overt sentimentality.''

''Using abstraction to intensify symbols, Mr. Yektai works... His collages of cut canvas on canvas further show his gift for original, originating forms and their placement as well as his provocative use of color, a melange of improvisation and invention.''

''Abstraction becomes visionary feeling and instinct before conscious observation and thought, as well as... discovery.''

''As for the entries for the 64th Annual Members Exhibition, judged this year by well-known art writer Amei Wallach, best in show was garnered by a sculpture of oil paint, palette scrapings, and pigment residue by Darius Yektai...''