Long renowned for his epic apocalyptic canvases done in an allegorical realist manner, painter Jorg Dubin has recently broken new ground with a series of formal portraits. Though superficially removed from the lurking melancholy and angst-ridden dread and menace of his former repertoire of men chained like dogs, wearing battlefield gas masks, or languishing in sinking rowboats, the artist’s latest works do not form so much a departure as they might at first seem, as each is a micro-narrative with its own story to impart.
Historically, portraiture has been fueled by two contending approaches: the impulse towards definition of the essence of the person being painted and the impulse towards interpretation of that essence.  These impulses differ but are not necessarily contradictory.  Portraiture has historically been prone to two other conflicting approaches as well: the impulse to capture a fleeting instant in the life of the subject, and the impulse to capture what is constant, eternal, and unchanging.
Dubin is concerned with all these things, but tends still more fundamentally towards a formulation of the “big picture” – a representation of those aspects of persona which are both unique to an individual and rooted in the deepest wellsprings of being. Dubin has always been a visual existentialist. Whether the subjects of his portraits are caught unselfconsciously at a trivial moment or at a critical crossroads in life, circumstance is merely a peripheral, incidental element for this artist, for he strives to see beyond situational triggers to glimpse yet weightier formative factors underlying mental, emotional, and spiritual structure. 
Though a product of technical virtuosity, the surfaces of Dubin’s paintings are not so slick as to be classifiable as “photo-realist”. Giving a nod to post-modernist prerogatives, Dubin allows the raw bones of the painting process to peep through; he doesn’t try to hide his tracks and make everything look as pat as a photograph and, while paying tribute to traditional portraiture, freely allows anomalies to occur. Accordingly, Dubin doesn’t glamorize; he presents his subjects “warts and all”, and his treatment of flesh reflects the strength and fragility, nobility and pathos, of all “human clay”. Dubin’s treatment of skin and use of dramatic lighting has always been extraordinary.  Plainly present in his latest portraits are all the minutely rendered amalgams of limbs and appendages, external orifices, and other physical mechanisms which are one of this artist’s trademarks, but only as signposts to the less obvious but more ponderous, subcutaneous qualities of what it is to be human.  Dubin knows that gesture, expression, posture and bearing offer clues to personality and character and that, as the poet said, every face is a “road map of the soul”. With a method matter-of-fact but not stiff, Dubin’s portraits instinctively drive straight to the heart of the enigma of every human individual and to what makes him or her distinctive and unique.  
Using a wan palette of slightly sickish, washed-out colors, Dubin renders wrinkles, creases, and calluses with the same meticulous, almost fetishistic attention he bestows upon such details as open collars, chin straps, gloves, wristwatches, headgear, pockets, belts, sunglasses, and ballpoint pens. His extra-sensitive    treatment of facial features, embodied by chiseled lips, chins, noses, and eye sockets, is complimented by his mastery of shadows – whether those under the awnings of eyebrows or inside ears or nostrils. Then poses are struck and props intrude.  Among inert fire extinguishers, forlorn furniture, empty buckets, and potatoes resting atop glasses of water, the drape of hair, the jut   of a leg, or the contours of a kneecap form whole landscapes. Gazing in defiance, slumped in defeat or exhaustion, inquisitive, contemplative, brazen with candor or sunk in dreamy reverie, Dubin’s subjects glower, stare, or ecstasize unabashedly.
Some introspective, some confrontational, some like inmates of some sort of sainted lunatic asylum, Dubin’s specimens are frozen in the permanent limbo of their own essences, trapped for all time in a corner of the artist’s studio, like butterflies pinned to a board. Not above questionable motives and dubious intentions, each nurses a secret. Soulcatcher Dubin chips away at them unerringly, determined to expose them, one and all.
              — Rick Gilbert, Critic