Monday, July 28, 2014

Elegant Ephemera




Elegant Ephemera

By Tom Wachunas

    “…Thus there exists an essential truth that must be disengaged from the outward appearance of the objects to be represented. This is the only truth that matters…Exactitude is not the truth.”

-Henri Matisse, 1947


    EXHIBIT: The Art of Living – art by Lisa Vincenzo at The Little Art Gallery, located in the North Canton Public Library, 185 North Main Street, North Canton, THROUGH AUGUST 23 / 330.499.4712 ext. 312  www.ncantonlibrary.com

    Read Lisa Vincenzo’s statement for this, her first-ever solo show, and it should become clear that for her, drawing isn’t limited to being only a preparation, a step in realizing a future “finished” work. “Drawings are my diary,” she writes, “and I simply draw from life.” Her desire is for us to see her pieces as windows on her “…deep empathy and love for all living things.” Her drawings, then, aren’t merely academic exercises in recording the precise look of her subjects so much as her response and relationship to their essences.
    And what a vigorous, captivating response it is! Beneath the drawings’ sketchy appearance is a confident, visceral spontaneity - rendered in a variety of deftly handled media including watercolor, ink, pencil, charcoal, lithography and even IPad. Whether bold or delicate, the visual choreography of her mark-making is imbued with purposeful energy without being fussy or extraneous.
    This is to say that even at their most abstracted, the drawings indicate an intuitive grasp of communicative gestural dynamics. Without dependence on “realistic” detail, pieces such as Midas Breaks Free (India ink) and Spirit Horse (watercolor), for example, still effectively convey the horses’ mass in motion. Her watercolor, Women with Strings, for all of the paint’s muscular blackness, flows nonetheless with lyrical expressivity. Vincenzo understands how variations in the breadth and character of lines, the saturation of tones and relative sizes and qualities of shapes can set up engaging visual rhythms that guide our eyes around the picture plane.
   A particularly exciting component of the exhibit is the inclusion of 13 IPad color pieces (Kitten, shown above, is an example). While intimate in scale, they fairly burst with a celebratory radiance. Rather than opting to wow us with any number of the dazzling special effects available through digital technology, Vincenzo offers disarmingly simple compositions that have a painterly air. Several of them, in their refined, elegant design, lusciously saturated color and simplified shapes remind me of the arresting balance of Matisse’s late-career paper cut-outs.
   With these digitally-generated images, I think Vincenzo successfully presents unassailable proof that efficacious drawing need not be constrained to historically traditional tools and techniques – techniques in which she is clearly adept. In a broader sense, her works remind me that at its core drawing is, after all, pure configuration. It is a way of seeing, then organizing spatial relationships, in two or three dimensions, between various formal elements including line, shape/form, texture and tonality/color.
    Vincenzo’s art is a passionate commitment to being in the moment, to  skillfully observing the ephemeral, and making palpable the spirit of life itself.  

    PHOTOS (from top): Kitten (IPad); Airport (India Ink); Woman with the Red Umbrella (Pencil); I Dream of Jungles and Stars (Charcoal and India Ink) 

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Where Hand Meets Heart





Where Hand Meets Heart

By Tom Wachunas


    …Forms seem to rise and fall like so many gaseous clouds and liquid streams, conjuring perhaps, ghosts of a volatile, primordial soup.” From ARTWACH, January 22, 2010

    EXHIBIT: Gene Barber at Journey Art Gallery, 431 4th Street NW, downtown Canton, THROUGH AUGUST 13, (330) 546-7061  www.journeyartgallery.com

    After several years’ absence from the local exhibition circuit (due to health concerns), I’m pleased to remind you that Gene Barber is back, with a strong showing of 15 pieces at Journey Art Gallery. Along with a group of very recent acrylic paintings on canvas, there are four exquisite older drawings. Untitled and Warrior Princess (pictured above), for example, are mesmerizing organic abstractions – superbly designed and composed, and  featuring Barber’s linear precision along with his pointillist ink technique.
    His recent acrylic paintings still possess the sinuous, raw physicality and luminosity of his older abstract canvases, perhaps even more so. But with these pieces, I sensed a shift in Barber’s overall design of the picture plane. Older works were configured such that his palette within a single painting was generously varied, with lots of push-pull between warm and cool hues. Further, the arc of his organic shapes and directional linearities were distributed more widely across the plane, usually edge to edge.
    These newer paintings, however, comprised largely of a dominant hue with analogous variations (sometimes including sublime whispers of  contrasting hues), are subtly tighter, more compressed. I included the quote at the top of this post because the overall spirit it describes in Barber’s paintings from four or five years ago still holds true now. And he continues to paint with his fingers. He literally lets his hands, his flesh, manipulate the ephemeral, indeed primal energy seeming to seethe below all that gestural surface expressivity.
    And from that energy below, that heart if you will, something specific emerges in each canvas. These new paintings have concentrated focal points that hover in the center of the plane, or nearly so. They’re distinct pictorial events - visual to be sure, but I suspect metaphorical as well.
    Call them what you will – announcements, discoveries, revelations, personal epiphanies. In any event, welcome back, Mr. Barber.

    PHOTOS, courtesy Su Nimon (from top): Cosmic Birth; Bird Feeding; Warrior Princess; Untitled

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Bjorn To The Task






Bjorn To The Task

By Tom Wachunas
 

     “Frankly, this culture of unbridled narcissism and oversharing has become like a metastasizing cancer that is eroding all traditional notions of personal discretion and public decency.” – Anthony L. Hall

   “I strongly urge you to study portrait painting, do as many portraits as you can and don't flag. We must win the public over later on by means of the portrait; in my opinion it is the thing of the future.” –Vincent van Gogh, from a letter written to painter Émile Bernard

   “…I hope that this project inspires people to look inside of themselves and ask, "What inspirations have I been ignoring and how can I begin to set them free?"  We are all worthy of it.  We are all artists.”   -Bjorn Bolinder

    EXHIBIT: The One-A-Day Project: Re-imaging the Selfie with Bjorn Bolinder, at Translations Art Gallery THROUGH JULY 26, 331 Cleveland Avenue NW, downtown Canton / viewing hours Wed.-Sat., Noon to 5 p.m.



    I admit to having an ambivalent attitude toward the social media onslaught of “selfies.” On the one hand, they constitute a viral phenomenon that earned dubious legitimacy when “selfie” was declared “word of the year” in 2013 by the Oxford English Dictionary. Essentially, selfies are a trend that further illustrates our societal lust to overcome anonymity. Call it an apotheosis of cultural self-absorption. And ironically enough, I think that after a point, this pictorial plethora has succeeded in rendering a homogenized, rather silly sameness to the countless individuals who indulge their desires to be quickly “known” and otherwise friended, flattered or envied. Fifteen minutes of fame, anyone?
    On the other hand, if we consider the selfie trend in the larger context of self-portraiture as a human practice, there’s nothing new about it at all – just the mechanism and, to a considerable extent, the “aesthetics.” I still recall all those goofy images generated during the last century of faces and bare butts squished on to the glass plates of Xerox machines. (You could call them yesteryear’s analogs to today’s digital dross.) But I’m speaking here of self-portraiture as a viable artistic pursuit. And from that perspective, a substantial number of artists have historically engaged the practice and left a distinguished legacy of compelling works – Dürer, Rembrandt, van Gogh and Frida Kahlo, to name only some.
    This is where things get a bit dicey. Are selfies an art form simply by virtue of their being photographs?  It’s an arguable point, and I tend to regard them as a kind of pop art subset – a highly accessible if not “lowbrow” democratization of the photographic medium. Even as many online exhibitors might employ photo shop editing, their motivation seems more about vanity and superficial “special effects” than genuine creativity.
    The photographs by New York City-based artist Bjorn Bolinder are at once a commentary on the whole notion of selfies and a transcending of their usually generic, mundane or cutesy content. I’ll not be recapping here what initially prompted this collection (for that, please click on the above links to Translations Gallery and Bolinder’s web sight for the expanded statement and examples of his work) except to say, with great admiration, that Bolinder is clearly passionate about and committed to the sheer discipline of daily prioritizing his creative process.
    So yes, on the surface, the subject matter is Bjorn times Bjorn times Bjorn, day after day, spanning more than 100 consecutive days…But collectively, these images are a scintillating diary of sorts -  an intriguing visual autobiography of ideas, inspirations, possibilities to be realized and challenges to be met both technically and aesthetically. More than monotonous or ordinary repetitions of his face, these superbly crafted images embody the soul of a storyteller, alive with a sense of theatricality, played out in various settings and atmospheres. They’re alternately whimsical and haunting, playful and contemplative, dramatic and fantastical.
    The photographs aren’t framed or mounted in the conventional manner but rather suspended in air, hung with clothes pins on lines that stretch wall-to-wall across the gallery. Viewing them is literally a moving experience, requiring us to walk through the rows, all the while reading the hand-written notes interspersed among the photos explaining the progression of particular concepts or goals. Indeed, motion itself is a recurring thematic aspect in many of the images, and not so surprising when considering Bolinder’s background as a dancer.
   This collection, then, is a record of making each day a realized, tangible product – an intentional step in an ongoing dance, so to speak. As such, the exhibit presents the wondrously designed choreography of a rich imagination.


    PHOTOS, ©Bjorn Bolinder 2014, from top: Air Slumber, Cell Jump, Fangtastic, Jump/Catch, Typical Saturday Night

Saturday, July 5, 2014

Shifting Perspectives






Shifting Perspectives

By Tom Wachunas
 

    “Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing sensations.”
    -Paul Cezanne

    “I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.”
    -Henri Matisse
 
    EXHIBIT: Organic Medley- art by Irene Tobias Rodriguez, at the Little Art Gallery, located in the North Canton Public Library THROUGH JULY 12, 185 North Main Street, North Canton/ 330-499-4712,  Ext. 312

    This one almost got away from me, and I apologize for the late posting. But if you haven’t seen it yet, there’s just six days left (gallery closed on Sundays in summer) to see a generous sampling of work from one of this area’s more versatile and prolific artists.
    The creative sensibilities of Irene Tobias Rodriguez are so eclectic that were she a songwriter, her tunes might be variously categorized as easy listening (light classical), folk, pop, even jazz. As it is, the award-winning, robust diversity on view here takes the form of mixed media sculpture (including painted gourds), quilts, woven baskets, jewelry, drawings, digital art (mixed media) and acrylic painting.
    In the realm of painting, her well-crafted style is representational and hovers somewhere between the fluid, painterly surfaces of Impressionism and the more exacting details and textures of Realism. Genres range from maritime and landscape (urban and natural) to still life, floral and animal.
   I was particularly drawn to two aspects of the paintings, the first being what Rodriguez calls her Puzzle Paintings. Seven of them are on view here. These scenes are executed on separately cut pieces of board and assembled into a whole, like a puzzle.
    Each piece is a “mini” painting in itself, and their junctures create a linear element threaded throughout the picture plane. It’s a playful technique, to be sure. Yet rather than crudely fragment or intrude upon the overall unity of the image, this method intensifies the experience of pictorial depth in a fresh way, not too unlike Paul Cezanne’s explorations of binocular vision, rendering simultaneous viewpoints of a thing.
    In her exquisite Segments of an Apple Tree, for example, Rodriquez presents the apples convincingly enough as sumptuous, discrete orbs while introducing spatial distortions. Subtle shifts of details on the surfaces are such that our sense of nearness to, or distance from the fruit generates a pulsating effect. The ambiguities of depth and light that this method allows are even more amplified in the equally intricate Lone Feather, wherein a few of the puzzle segments are sunk below the surface of the painting.
    As for the second aforementioned intriguing aspect, there are two works here that are of a distinctly different character than the rest of the acrylic paintings. Each manifests a Modernist ideation that, prior to seeing this show, I didn’t really think was a significant component in Rodriguez’s already impressive creative arsenal. The two men in the dramatic Ordinary Discussion are rendered with a fluidity of line and intensity of palette that evokes the brooding lyricism of European Expressionists such as Munch, Kirchner or Nolde.  And the somewhat abstract Rabbits Two exudes an ebullient color dynamic and elegant compositional balance that brings to mind Matisse, particularly when he observed that, “…in all the tones there must result a living harmony of colors, a harmony analogous to that of a musical composition.”
    So maybe in a metaphorical sense, Rodriguez is a songwriter, and a very facile one at that, capable of changing her tunes to best fit the idea at hand. You could count these two works, along with her Puzzle Paintings, among her greatest hits.


    PHOTOS, courtesy Irene Tobias Rodriguez, from top: Lily Path; Segments of an Apple Tree;  Lone Feather; Ordinary Discussion; Rabbits Two