Category: reviews

by Mary Hrbecek

The Scully Tomasko Foundation presents “Early and Recent Work,” an exhibition of twenty-one acrylic and metallic paintings on canvas and an installation of thirty-three ink on paper drawings by curator, art historian, teacher and artist Robert C. Morgan. The paintings impress the viewer in a timeless cohesive way as though they were organized as a site-specific project that is designed to catch the cool ambient aura that pervades the space filling it with diffuse white light, reminiscent of a secluded sanctuary. The salient tones of warm earth brown and dark blue-brown in many of the works act as triggers to subconsciously generate remembrances of the somber ambience of the early Sienese Italian Renaissance. As a group, the paintings create a hushed atmosphere that invites contemplation and reverie, triggered by the clear minimal content and the conceptual reductive intentions they embody. The metallic paint interacts with the earth tones to mitigate their absorption of light by reflecting it; the effect is both calming and stimulating. Perhaps because the works radiate a spirit of peace, they evoke a sense of joy that seems infused with personal meaning.

There is a playfulness in effect despite the obviously serious intensions conveyed by the paintings that provides a sense of ambiguity, despite the clearly carved nature of the highly specific honed smooth shapes.

There are architectural underpinnings in many of the works in the Loggia series, while other pieces suggest a debt to natural configurations. They evince the mental action of an architect whose job requires that he get the spaces to fit perfectly within the whole structure at hand; the thirteen paintings in the “Loggia” series share this essential quality. The magnitude of each shape in relation to the interrelated elements forms a code within the confines of the four edges of each work. The “Elements, Parts I and II” recall game-boards that create enigmatic hidden meanings which relate to secret undefined puzzles. They suggest chess boards that display their subjects with uncanny discretion and respect.

Light and darkness play a major role in the unfolding dramas, as the viewer’s visual perception is sharpened by the necessity to gaze deeply at closely mixed tones, to discern the end and beginning of many of the forms. With continuous viewing, the shapes may appear to vibrate, to move, to resist efforts to pin down their perimeters. Although the works may seem simple, their reduced number of elements compels the viewer to detect changes wrought from barely discernable alterations in movement and placement of shapes.

Clearly the paintings fall into the rubric of the honed geometric forms and primary structures characterized by alterations that identify them within the post-painterly abstract genre. The play of movement and spatial divisions challenge the eye to perceive the minuscule changes within the context of this visual dance.

The pieces radiate thoughtfulness; equally, they are well defined, creating pictorial space at times by overlapping flattened forms, or by the juxtaposition of warm and cool hues to generate depth. Through his use of metallic paint and earth tones, the artist intends to capture the moment when light is reflected and absorbed, embodying the reuniting of opposites set forth in the Tao Teh Ching, 500 B.C. Morgan’s use of line animates the works, drawing the eye in unexpected directions through and around forms to differentiate and delineate them. The earth-tones in many of the “Loggia” paintings recall raw nature as a backdrop that surrounds sophisticated dark shapes. The earth red and metallic gold break with traditional notions of minimal essence to create an offshoot rich in suggestiveness.

“Lissajous 3” and “Lissajous 2” disclose quite diverse concerns when compared with the “Loggia” paintings. Both pieces display adorned gold and metallic circles that could represent planets or even machine parts separated from their mechanisms. In the rectangular and square formats of the “Optical Flip” (diptych), 2010, the artist carves the terrain of each segment into three similarly sized portions. Tension develops as the eye travels horizontally across the format, to be pulled back to center by the elongated pale gray rectangles. The subtle play of vertical thin and thicker bars in the middle draws the eye and activates the mind’s curiosity. “Pyramid Shift” creates an area within a black plane that holds the gray pyramid at a distance from a thin rod that carves the warm rectangle. This structure establishes tangible space that invites the viewer’s speculation. The “Living Smoke and Clear Water” installation of Chinese ink on Conte paper drawings flows organically from one to the next, giving the impression of small Haiku poems quickly noted, in a reverie engendered by the attributes of the materials and the vision of nature.

From the standpoint of an instinctual, intuitive observer who derives essence and intentions experientially, this exhibition discloses a tremendous reverence for each separate form and each relationship in which the shapes participate. Care and investment define each piece. If art can embody love, I believe there is evidence of such feeling in these paintings.

by Mary Hrbacek

Grimm presents “Tetris,” an exhibition of seventeen new acrylic and acrylic emulsion paintings by Dutch artist Tjebbe Beekman. In Beekman’s deeply felt and strongly envisioned images, the components and fragments function as indefinable players in what can be described as confounding theatrical productions; they immediately impress the viewer with their powerful symbolic meaning. The title of the exhibition lends insights into Beekman’s artistic intentions. “Tetris” is defined as an “endeavor involving rearranging things of a different shape into physical space.” 

Beekman excels at making visually convincing painted “collage” details. The interconnecting dystopian elements read as layers of expressive recognizable objects such as cloth, balls, rope, pieces of wood, trays and sticks to name but a few, whose relationships to each other seem unfathomable. They convey deeply intriguing yet puzzling undefined messages. The variety of textures, colors, unspecified articles and entities grip the viewer in a psychic drama presented in many of the works, in the pictorial space of a Picasso collage or Synthetic Cubist still life. The shallow arena appears to be constructed of overlapping items that might have been dredged from a cellar, woodshed or attic trunk. 

The works on view with their attendant narrative titles, give the impression that they relate personally to the artist’s psychic and emotional states of consciousness. These pieces have underpinnings in Old Master compositions; Poussin comes to mind. They have no pop culture references beyond the 1980’s arcade video game entitled “Tetris.” Playing this game is said to thicken the cortex and possibly increase brain competence. The painting actually entitled “Tetris” integrates unrelated strata of abstract and figurative items, which may symbolize the chaos in which we live in the world. Arranging ultra-complex configurations woven within pictorial structures probably provides relief for distressing emotional experiences. Art-making can be a constructive venue for exploring feelings and venting emotions directed at the charged episodes that cling inexorably in our consciousness.

The piece entitled “The Miraculous Drought” diverges from the collage-based still life works, with a storm setting in which four human figures reach dramatically into a trough to collect water, amongst a barrage of flying debris. A desperate peacock, the flamboyant bird that symbolizes personal vanity, cranes its neck to beg for water, verifying that human and animal needs intersect. In a mesmerizing display of nature’s chaotic powers, the debris blows wildly across the top of the format signaling an apocalyptic natural disaster which pits us not only against nature, but against each other.  It seems the artist is striving to reconcile life’s struggles with its rewards.  

The various collage-like and cubistic spaces seem to express their own particular emotional conundrums disguised within the undefined forms presented. “To Pray for the Living and the Dead” hints at aquatic looking shapes that seem to intersect a black empty area that conceivably signifies the “self.” Sensory stimulation gives a certain distraction and pleasure to life, when conflicts and unresolved relationships, especially from the past, become intolerable to bear.  

The artist’s superb technical mastery of the medium comprises a striking underlying message that permeates this mesmerizing body of works. With images whose underpinnings in the old and new masters are articulated by honed elements with deeply saturated hues, few art shows today are more serious or more engulfing.

Tjebbe Beekman: Tetris (October 21 through November 12, 2022) at Grimm Gallery, 54 White Street, New York City, NY 10013

by Steve Rockwell

“Town: The Muscle Show” at Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto is a display of Harold Town flexing his own creative muscle in the closing decade of his life. I admit that I couldn’t  suppress a smile at his zesty full throttle tackle of a subject that was not “in” or popular in any refined, cultural sense. His building up to this painterly leap is revealed in a statement that he made in the late ‘70s, “It’s time for me to become unpopular again.” Predictably, the works were disparaged as trivial by the art establishment. 

Town stuck to his guns, insisting they should be included in his 1986 retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario. As painting subject, his musclemen paintings here have proven resilient, being also prescient. Bodybuilding itself at that time underwent a rehabilitation from the freakish to a somewhat respectable arm of the physical fitness movement that took off in the 1980s. The acknowledged catalyst seems to have been the 1977 bodybuilding documentary, “Pumping Iron,” that introduced Arnold Schwarzenegger to popular culture. Shelley Town cites “Pumping Iron” as an inspiration of her father for the Muscle paintings. The artist would subsequently go on to collect 1970s muscle magazines.

A liberation from the constraint of “taste” fuelled a sense of the heroic in Town’s “Muscle Man” series of paintings, that included an occasional “Muscle Woman.” The artist’s “Muscle Man #1” stands out as a gesture of defiance, featuring a subject with flexed bicep and clenched fist raised high. Town dated the work April 1, 1981 as perhaps a sucker punch to his critics, as if to say, “Plenty of time for history to sort out where the joke lands.”

Apart from the anomaly of bodybuilders as subject, Town’s “Muscle Men” paintings possess an exuberance independent of their images. Their allusion to the landscape is clear in their unshackled freedom with brush, color and form. Similarly to the artist’s 1970s “Snap” series of paintings, “The Muscle Show” is a prime example of a Harold Town career shift on steroids, energized here by a supporting tactic, “pumping irony.”

Harold Town: The Muscle Show (October 15 – November 19, 2022) at Christopher Cutts Gallery, 21 Morrow Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6R 2H9 Phone: 1-416-532-5566 Email: info@cuttsgallery.com

by Jen Dragon

(New York, NY)  In a New York art world that has long favored male artists, Francine Tint has always been an unabashedly female abstract expressionist painter. Once ushered into this Cedar Tavern boys’ club by the curator and art writer Clement Greenberg, Tint has held her own ever since. Her immersive painting style was not just about fierce focus and pure energy but also physical prowess as she dons fisherman-style rain gear to throw paint around freely, using large house painting brushes to create a maelstrom of paint, pigment and passion.

Tint’s most recent work in the solo exhibition Life in Action at TheNational Arts Club (November 7 – December 2, 2022), is a departure from her well-known bold surfaces and powerfully deep canvases to focus instead on shimmering color and effervescent light. In Pink Pearls, Tint’s gestural swirls of warm white paint dance across raw canvas acting at once as shape and form. The iridescent paints shift from lightest pearlescent lights to darker rainbow hues that compel the viewer to move back and forth in space to fully experience and encompass the light changes. Strawberry Fields reaches for bold greens and luscious pink madders that circle one another on the bare cotton canvas. A virtuoso drawn charcoal line guides and accelerates the viewer’s gaze, preventing it from resting too long in a visual stanza or traveling too far down a vortex. 

Fallopian forms abound shaped by bold brushwork that describe both void and form. There is a constant balance but never a stasis as Tint rocks steadily from one end of the canvas to the other ,reaching out in all directions, embracing space and being and leading the way to the sheer pleasure of vision and the divinity of true light. In the painting, WomanSoul , Tint introduces mesh fabric elements that undulate softly with the alizarin pink brushwork. Flecked with touches of ochre, the painting presents an aquatic suspension of time and the comfort of open, embracing light. 

If there is a common thread in all of Tint’s 50 year career as a painter, this would be found in her masterful ability to weave space. Moving from left to right, top to bottom, Francine Tint allows forms to undulate from front to back, and again from in to out. Whether she is building space or flying free across raw canvas, Francine Tint harnesses a powerful life force that embraces and channels the power of paint and the grace of the human spirit. 

Francine Tint: Life in Action (November 7 – December 2, 2022) at The National Arts Club, Gramercy Park, New York City, NY

by Steve Rockwell

Ginette Legaré’s “Supply Chains” exhibition at Birch Contemporary in Toronto speaks to the moment, a time when the links to the network of things necessary or desirable to our lives are showing strain. Their pain has arrived in the form of higher prices for fuel and food, and frequently an empty shelf – the canary in the coal mine. Legaré’s “Hardwired” wall sculpture personifies want at its extreme, a skeletal Dickensian Oliver with an empty begging bowl who pleads, “Please sir, I want some more!”

Answering to any crimes associated with breaks in the supply chain may be educed from the artist’s “Lineup,” a sculpture that commands an entire wall. The viewer is invited as detective to ferret out the usual suspects from this motley crew of 21 danglers. The innocent one might be the lightbulb in the very top center of the lineup, its sole felony being one of omission, the poverty of illumination. It brought to mind Picasso’s “Guernica” with its exploding eye, similarly positioned to Legaré’s lightbulb. A further analysis of the eye and its perceptive properties is the artist’s “Le compas dans l’œil,” mounted on the wall of the gallery’s overflow office space. We accept “Guernica” as potent protest art against the heinous barbarism of war, with the understanding that an economic war may equally unleash untold global miseries through crippling disruptions in supply chains. 

Legaré’s floor sculpture “Urban Strands” is reminiscent of a Rube Goldberg machine, which describes a chain-reaction contraption made to perform a simple task in a complicated way. In any case, “Urban Strands” seems to be a mash-up of the supply chain logistics from conveyor belt, packaging, shipping container, to shelf and display, equipped with a wire-frame that may have once held a mirror. The last item may be a bid to the viewer for a moment of reflection on the object’s wonder, as the consumer is simultaneously head and tail of this chain, being the ox that grinds the grain and also one who devours it. 

Suspended from the ceiling of the gallery positioned to roughly its center was the wire sculpture “Upheld.” Sweeping upward above the walls of the show space gave it the properties of a tornado, as if harnessing into a funnel the charge emitted by the works, particularly from the densely-packed “Lineup” piece. If something purely visual could emit audio, this work might be likened to a “wall of sound,” something record producer Phil Spector achieved famously in pop music. Legaré’s “Lineup” as an LP has its A and B side of 20 works in grooves simulated by the suspended wires, each side evenly divided by the mute lightbulb.

Ginette Legaré’s “Supply Chains” exhibition is a patiently assembled body of primarily wire objects that have undergone a kind of excavation by the artist as found remains of a still-living civilization, their skins having sloughed to reveal something essential and new in the articulation of a language. The keys to its translation involves a mixing and matching the wire letters of the artist’s alphabet with our own experience as a way of “sounding out” the material world around us. It is through this process that Legaré’s lightbulb illuminates.

Ginette Legaré: Supply Chains (October 20–November 26, 2022). Birch Contemporary, 129 Tecumseth Street, Toronto, Canada  M6J 2H2 416.365.3003  birchcontemporary.com