BIOTECTURES and ARCHISCAPES
By Tom Wachunas
EXHIBIT: Urban Biology – paintings by Betsy
Cavalier-Casey and Lizzi Aronhalt / at Cyrus Custom Framing and Art Gallery,
2645 Cleveland Ave. NW, Canton, Ohio / THROUGH JUNE 2, 2017 http://cyruscustom.com/
“Both science and art have to do with ordered
complexity.”
— Lancelot Law Whyte
“Painting from nature is not copying the
object; it is realizing one’s sensations.”
- Paul Cezanne
The last time I saw
work by Betsy Cavalier-Casey was in 2013 at North Canton’s Little Art Gallery (
reviewed here at http://artwach.blogspot.com/2013/09/celebrating-connectivity.html
). Her pieces in this current exhibit, curated by Erin Mulligan and with a few
works from that 2013 show (including an updated version of her marvelous
floating sculptural installation piece, “Out of Impulse”), are essentially a reiteration
of her painterly explorations in the realm of interconnectivity within a given
system of diverse components. More specifically, you could call any one of her
paintings a kind of diagram, or an abstract anatomy of what might be biological microsystems and processes.
While I don’t have
much more of great substance to add to what I wrote in my 2013 review, it’s
worth re-noting the especially tactile nature of her painted surfaces. In some
ways they source the legacy of Jackson Pollock’s “action paintings.” He manipulated
all sorts of paints, in varying viscosities and thicknesses, in all sorts of
unconventional ways (by 1940s and 1950s standards) – dripping and flinging,
splattering and pouring, pooling and scraping. His pictures are compelling
documents of choreographed gestures and motions that marry the material
behavior of paint to the ephemeral effects of space, time, and gravity.
That said,
Cavalier-Casey’s paintings, despite their ostensibly abstract feel, are more
intentionally managed entities. Hers are pictures of things drawn, albeit
loosely, from the visible or accessible world, as opposed to Pollock’s
substantially more dense and wholly non-objective content. Relatively speaking,
Cavalier-Casey leaves lots of air in her pictures. And she often articulates
passages wherein she outlines the contours of organic shapes with a sharpie.
There’s a certain intimacy to making these thin lines in counterpoint to the
less delicate action of, say, pouring a pool of color on to the surface and
letting it dry as it will, producing a variety of textures such as wrinkles or
cracks. Think of it as the difference between writing in long-hand script, and
shouting out loud. Yet both of these mark-making methods function harmoniously
enough in her paintings, generating an elegant symbiosis.
Lizzi Aronhalt’s arresting cityscapes shout
out loud too, with both a highly luminous palette (much like that of
Cavalier-Casey) and the incorporation of strong linear elements, often drawn in
black. While those elements can appear to be super-imposed outlines, they also
act as skeletal underpinnings that reinforce the rhythms of all those bold
architectural shapes. At times, Aronhalt’s thinner lines seem to float and
meander in a scribbled manner, like microbursts of energy animating the objects
and the air in her scenes. These pictures have a pulse. Listen. Hear their
heartbeat?
Stylistic and
iconographic differences aside, both of these artists, with remarkable panache,
engage that elusive balance between spontaneity and planning, between lyrical
intuition and conscious engineering. Whether micro or macro in scope, their
works are intriguing testaments to an aesthetic truth embraced by such seminal
modernists as Manet, Cezanne, Matisse, Pollock, and beyond: The painted surface
is a life unto itself.
PHOTOS, from top:
Betsy Cavalier-Casey – Hyperactitivity;
Pods; Super Frazzled / Lizzi Aronhalt – Pigeons
Twice Removed; Mountains and Dishes; Ohrid
