Category: reviews

by Federico Lynch Ferraris

Nadia Coen, Mahmoud Hamadani, Armita Raafat, Michael David, Andrew Huston, Alyse Rosner, Paul Michael Graves, Bodo Korsig, Steven Salzman, Margaret Weber, Mark Williams
at Bienvenu Steinberg & C in New York City

Across painting, sculpture, and installation, “Time and Materials” highlights the use of unconventional materials – glass, resin, plastic straws, fabrics, and carpets – to create works that are both temporal and tactile. Many of the works lean abstract, inviting the viewer to consider the significance embedded in the use of obscure materials and the progression of time encoded in the art.

The exhibition repeatedly emphasizes material experimentation as an outlet for interdisciplinary expression. Paul Michael Graves’ pieces play with the intersection between art and his previous career as a helicopter pilot. Composed of black dots and lines set across a bronze background, the pieces evoke the visual components of aerial map making. Initially appearing abstract, the artwork deliberately uses the black marks to resemble plotted coordinates and flight paths as seen from above. Graves’ interpretation of time reflects the broader theme of the unique experience of time. The pieces display time and duration through flight paths rather than fixed units.

Mahmoud Hamadani’s geometric compositions similarly gesture towards his mathematical foundations. In his untitled work, Hamadani arranges nine black frames into a square. Within each frame, seven diamonds are uniquely oriented, with each diamond representing a day of the week. The subtle variations within each frame mirror the rhythms and changes of days and weeks. Continuing the larger theme of time interpreted through interdisciplinary practices, Hamadani’s geometric orientations suggest that time is measured, rhythmic, and symmetrical through a mathematical lens.

Andrew Huston continues the use of geometric shapes to portray time. With seven panels, each filled with gold pigment and black dots, the artwork represents the seven days of the week. Although the panels are fixedly aligned to emulate calendar pages, each panel is distinct. The variation among the series of panels emphasises the unpredictability of time despite the expected rhythm of the week.

Armita Raafat’s portrayal of time draws on a more fluid interpretation, by contrast. Raafat draws on traditional Muqarnas while reimagining it with vivid, unconventional materials. Composed of resin, tiles, and fabrics, the work revisits traditional architecture with a modern perspective, suggesting that time, rather than being fixed, can be actively returned to and reconsidered. The piece, being an extension of Raafat’s inquiry into Muqarnas, maintains the ongoing theme of interests and passions altering perception of time found throughout the exhibition.

Bodo Korsig’s “Zerspringen des Zustandes”, which translates from German to “Shattering of the State”, approaches the theme of time through one moment of rupture. The work suggests that time does not only unfold – it snaps. The “shattering” becomes a moment when continuity is lost, and a new state abruptly emerges. This interpretation of time aligns with Korsig’s focus on human behavior under extreme conditions. In moments of fear or violence, mental states often do not erode over time; they shatter instantly. The piece introduces the irreversibility of time and its capacity to collapse into a single moment of change. In contrast to other works in the exhibition, which focus on the cycle and rhythm of time, Korsig centers its immediacy and instantaneity.

Alyse Rosner’s piece, “From Wind or Sky or Myth (shadow)” evokes the visual intensity of fireworks – brief yet expansive bursts that unfold simultaneously – suggesting that time is not a singular passing instant, but a convergence of multiple moments occurring at once.
Some works do not specifically reference time, however. Instead, they fall under the exhibition’s material aspect. Michael David, for example, uses nontraditional materials such as glass, silicone, fabric, and glitter in his work, “The Batman”. Innovative uses of various materials are also present in the works of Nadia Coen, Steven Salzman, Margaret Weber, and Mark Williams.

The title of the exhibition draws on the policy under which clients pay contractors a fixed amount for the time spent and materials used. In the context of the exhibition, time and material are established as intertwined and in constant conversation.

Slater Memorial Museum, Norwich, CT

by D. Dominick Lombardi

Alexey von Schlippe (1915-1988) left his title as a Russian Baron in the court of Tsar Nicholas II behind when he became a citizen of the United States in 1960. What emerged in his art during and after this transition, was a unique sort of social realism, not unlike the immediacy and empathy in the egg tempera paintings of Ben Shahn, but with more intimacy and isolation.

As part of the introduction to the exhibit, a descriptive wall panel mentions Von Schlippe’s inspiration from Giotto and Piero Della Francesca, which is clear in his dry brush technique common in the ancient art of egg tempera painting, an approach Von Schlippe manages even when he paints with oils. The text also mentions the influence of West African art that shows up in various ways including subject matter featuring a black woman with an exposed upper body ala mid-century National Geographic magazine, abrupt perspective in terms of the stylized masks and adornments, and anatomical simplification of the same. Beyond these influences, the content presented in Von Schlippe’s paintings has many psychological traits that break through. Additionally, and Like Andrew Wyeth who also masterfully worked with egg tempera capturing the distinctive souls of his subjects that he knew well, Von Schlippe’s way with egg tempera finds a less individual representation of a specific soul. Von Schlippe takes a more universal approach to the harm imposed on an oppressed group longing to be treated with the respect they deserve in an age of drastic social change.

The paintings in this exhibition were created between the late 1950’s to the early 1980’s when America went through much social unrest and change. A fact that you can feel emanating from his female subjects in particular, which are often people of color seemingly exhausted by the burdens that come with living through troubled times. In Reclining Figure with White Blouse (undated, mid twentieth century) you get a sense of temporary peace as a compositional chrysalis forms around the figure. In this dream state, the harshness of the outside world is quietly absorbed in waves of harmless cleansing transitions within that subtle enclosure. And despite the metaphorical cushioning, there remains tension in the bent arms and fisted hands as they respond to indelible memories of repressive circumstances.

Exhibited directly below Reclining Figure with White Blouse is Reclining Figure (1980), which features a middle aged woman who still wears her simple black shoes – a detail that does not appear in any of the other paintings that all feature bare footed subjects. Reclining Figure also has more clarity of the figure that includes more realistic facial features, sharp pleats in a long skirt, a formal couch and hands set in a classic sleep, prayer-like pose giving this particular person a feeling of security and personal importance. Perhaps it’s someone who is related to the artist.

Conversely, the figure in Reclining Nude (Half Nude, Hands Raised) (1958) offers great import due to its overtly spiritual component and attention to detail in the sinuous, interconnected folds of fabric. The uplifted arms also add power and presence to the figure that none of the other paintings share. In the subject’s face, the relatively blank eyes give off a mask-like presence that brings us back to Von Schlippe’s interest in West African sculpture in all of its ritualistic or ceremonial forms.

Seascape (1978), which is solely painted in oil, ventures the furthest into the Surrealist realm. The composition has a sort of rocking motion, as if we are viewing the scene from a boat in choppy seas, as the looming sandy cliffs and flood of ocean water that shimmers in the distant horizon strain to gain their individual heights in the picture plane. Then you have the Houston to Boston leaning clouds above that create a clockwise rotation in the composition, giving the scene all of its endless movement. Ignoring all this upheaval is a seagull perched atop a small branch of a large piece of driftwood on the lower left of the painting. Facing outward and away from the center, the bird gives the narrative a bit of doubt to its truth, telling the viewer that all this commotion is imagined, pieced together from bits of memory and preconceptions.

As a still life painter, Von Schlippe is equally skilled. Still Life with Mushroom (1974) has that George Grosz, Otto Dix brand of intensity, while Two Bottles (1958) leans a bit more toward the softened and shimmering – closer to Giorgio Morandi, only with lots of detail in the reflective surfaces. All in all, a striking exhibition in one of the most distinctive and magnificent buildings in New England that is best known for its extensive collection of world class plaster casts such as Michelangelo’s Pietà and Moses, Donatello’s David and the Laocoön and His Sons by Baccio Bandinelli. A destination that is well worth the visit any time you are in Norwich, Connecticut.

by David Gibson

Artifice and systems of geometric complexity artfully coexist in the paintings of Lorien Suarez-Kanerva. They are passionately endowed manifestations of a world filled with symbolic structures that press so heavily upon one another that they give birth to new generations of form. The artist’s search for universal meaning brings us into metaphysical thickets and continuums of transcendent form. The experience they engender is called Liminality, in which travelling over a threshold between radically different environments, one feels a great unease. This is the conscious mind confronting subconscious understanding. Suarez is confronting oblivion in her paintings, and in portraying the elements that comprise its infinity, she bypasses liminality to realize a dynamic grace.

Suarez-Kanerva’s current retrospective, New Spiritual Abstraction, emerges not only through her own complex ministrations, but from a legacy within art history itself. Beginning with Wassily Kandinsky and continuing to the present time, there has been a strain of spiritual endeavor in art that has touched every generation. Each artist within the legacy of this spiritual endeavor has used the basic elements of composition to reach through form into meaning and beyond. When artists say “spiritual” they are in fact regarding religiosity without its attendant connection to creed. There’s a very idiosyncratic drive within each that connects these forms and gestures to a more introspective and complex perspective. What’s required is an innate ability, even a native aptitude, toward the use of form for the discernment of truth. Yet what is equally required is the willingness to continuously engage with progressively transformed models that may easily slip into new visions.

Suarez-Kanerva chooses the widest possible subject–the universe, because in choosing actual objects or real places there are always symbolic aspects or specific narratives applied to them. The universe is both a theme and a palette waiting to be portrayed. But as human beings we cannot throw off all association, all metaphor; some ideas are inherently part of our personal and collective identity. In denying symbolism, Suarez merely makes more room for it to creep in.

There’s a patchwork quality the Wheel Within A Wheel works that suggests a communal strategizing for construction, like that of an Exquisite Corpse. The combination of so many different mediums resulting in an image that seems inherently unfinished. It’s important to collect all these types of imagery into one composition to show the complexity of perception. The imperfect image is proof that knowledge is only as finite as the quality of encounter possible in our own overt evolutionary state. Not every area of the image needs to be filled in. There must be some room left for changes in the future.

Her Elan Flow series depicts from its very first image, the forces at work that invisibly shape recognizable matter in the universe, identify waves of gravity and other radiation flowing like eddies and tides from one planet to another. They are painted not as spheres but as flat spherical forms resembling targets. Placed in close proximity to one another, a view of an overt multiplicity, they become a tapestry of undulating forces. As Suarez-Kanerva moves from one painting to the next in this series, she alters the forms minutely so that we can perceive the formal changes as if they were interstellar gradations in the growth of a galaxy, like a cosmic petri dish. This is the quantum character of transformative material growth, which happens equally at the grandest and the most infinitesimal scale simultaneously. Suarez-Kanerva’s engagement with the forces at play beyond everyday human life, viewable only via a Hubble telescope, or through evidence taken down by a deep space satellite like Voyager, whose travels dwarf understanding, and can only relay images in modes of transfer now decades old.

In her Wheel Within A Wheel series, we are presented with a progressively developed series of images that likewise countenance the intimate details of cosmic or chemical interactions that hidebound to the very essential aspects of life itself. Suarez-Kanerva’s attempts to revisit and reclaim the pictorial authority she began in the Elan Flow series. But instead of attempting to capture the forms of space, she actualizes the complexity and dynamism of interacting psychological spheres at the outset. The types of depiction range more broadly and are contingent not of idealised forms finding their place in the depths of space, but metaphysical reckonings that take into account the very fabric of reality, its density and its detailed temperament, and allows us to peer into the layers themselves. Suarez-Kanerva’s search for meaning has led her through various versions of a focused objective: to manifest the immense forces that exist in the greater universe beyond earth, of which our planet likewise partakes. Wheel Within A Wheel suggests an infinite order arranged around a cyclical progression, driving immense forces. Yet what is collectively expressed in the greater variety of these works are many diverse and divergent strains of life, all coexisting within the multiversal context of existence, inherently cooperative in the play between complex models ostensibly realized.

The spiritual aspect of Suarez-Kanerva’s aesthetic is not merely a theme, it is an organizational and moral imperative. Art in her hands connects the viewer to their essential humanism–the aptitude and potential for the expressive realization of belief. The artist’s compulsion to depict nature beyond the sphere of shared experience invites our imagination to cross over liminal pathways into new worlds. The future beckons us from other planes of existence, of which Suarez-Kanerva allows a mere glimpse as she unlocks the doors of perception. Her forms are exemplary choices in the game of ultimate fate. She shines a light through the keyhole, illuminating the path forward. Beauty and knowledge await us in the great beyond.

Visionary Geometry at The Phillips Museum of Museum of Art in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, January 20-April 23, 2026