Author: David Hall

While Rob van der Schoor’s paintings have been seen in Memphis for nearly a decade, the artist and Amsterdam gallery owner’s latest appearance is as curator of “The Dutch Connection II” at Delta Axis at Marshall Arts. Several of van der Schoor’s own paintings are included, continuing in the vein of whimsical tree imagery that has become his latest obsession.

Ad de Jong’s New Albanian Sculpture strikes one as a cross between a cartoon ray gun and a colossal fishing lure, the fiberglass components gleaming in Popsicle colors. The handling of the fiberglass material is rather raw and clumsy, and the sculpture is attached to the wall in such a manner that, if one touches it, it shakes and shimmies like a bowl of Jell-O. Golden Stones is similarly constructed of clunky geometric elements but in this case is enclosed within a translucent husk, like some sort of alien egg being hatched. There is something creepy and unsettling about de Jong’s fantastical creatures, but enticingly so.

The paintings of Gijs Frieling are just as creepy, if not more so. The artist’s images toy with pseudoreligious themes in a style that is both simple and sophisticated. Whereas Frieling’s angels, saints, and doomed souls are depicted with the patented cornpone awkwardness of Howard Finster and Co., the artist’s deft handling of the luscious egg tempera would suggest this naiveté is a contrivance. The Heart of a Woman I and II portray the same scene from two different angles. The first shows a man in a red checkered shirt reaching into the heart of a woman as if she were an apparition, placing his fingers upon an open text (Bible?) that resides within her. The Heart of a Woman II not only shifts the orientation of the scene but casts it in an ethereal haze, as if viewed from some other dimension. A pair of hands reaching from beyond the margins of the painting like some divine force, directing the man and woman toward one another, drives this interpretation home.

A picture that really blew me away is Grid on Metal by Eric Knoote, in which bands of pink, orange, yellow, and green stripes are painted in vertical and horizontal layers upon sheet metal. The initial stripes appear to have been painted in more pungent hues then practically obliterated by successive layers of neutrals, but the traces that remain really communicate a feeling of depth, heightened by the remaining bare areas of reflective metal peeking from behind the stripes. Another aspect that makes this work delightful is the manner in which the sheet metal has been shaped into a pillow, so that the plaid design softly wraps around the edges of the form. Perhaps more contemplative is Knoote’s The 4th Color series, where wide bands of sheet metal pass vertically and horizontally around a stretcher, revealing only the four corners of the canvas, each painted a different color.

While the above pictures find Knoote tipping his hat to the right-angled compositions of Piet Mondrian, his Holes leaves that domain altogether. Using sheet metal once again, the artist has cut out a couple of ellipses and spray painted the lower portion sky-blue. The efficacy of this work is hampered by the fact that the ellipses don’t stick well to the wall of Marshall Arts, due to an unstable combination of adhesive and humidity. Even so, the work is not a total loss, as it creates an illusion of space through the interaction of reflective and opaque surfaces.

Jelle Kampen is also interested in the illusion of depth in his Saint of the Last Days, a mural painted directly on the wall. Its form is composed in bifurcated symmetry, resembling a Rorschach blot, except in Kampen’s blot, recognizable images reveal themselves as DNA strands, floral motifs, the Christian fish, and pop culture icons like the Volkswagen, Toyota, and Shell Oil logos. A sense of dimensional space is achieved by overlaying two such blots, one on top of the other, the first cast in an atmospheric mist by a layer of whitewash. Kampen’s use of symmetry as a design element imbues his work with sacred overtones, the profane iconography notwithstanding. I wondered if there were political commentary present in this work, perhaps a suggestion that consumerism has eclipsed religion.

There is also some fine work by Rudy d’ Arnaud Gerkens and Anne van der Pals. “The Dutch Connection II” is an enriching experience that no one should miss.

Through June 6th.

I asked an acquaintance departing the current exhibit at the Second Floor Contemporary Gallery what he thought of the photographs. He replied, “Photographs? Where were the photographs?” When I told the exhibition’s artists — Phillip Andrew Lewis and Martina Shenal — about this incident, they were both delighted. Each aspires to create works that transcend conventional notions of what the medium can convey.

Photography is generally regarded as a means of documentation. Even when photographs accentuate formal characteristics over narrative, the duplicative nature of film demands a subject. But in truth, the element essential to the medium is light. It is the ephemeral quality of light, rather than subject matter, that is at the core of Lewis’ and Shenal’s inquiry.

The artists have titled their installations after Roman mythological figures. Lewis’ series is titled “Venus,” after the goddess of love and beauty, which relates to the rich pinks and oranges that are prevalent in his pictures. The Roman personification of the south wind, “auster,” usually associated with fogs and rain or sweltering heat, is the title for Shenal’s offering. The reference could be to the veiled subjects and the austere compositions of her pictures.

The ambiguity of Shenal’s images is the result of objects being illuminated from behind and obscured by a translucent scrim, the focal point being the surface of the scrim itself, while the objects only appear as phantom traces. The distillation of the object through the use of this “distancing mechanism” is intended to emphasize the intangible and abstract. The artist’s aim is to invite a subjective response from the viewer in order, she says, to “lean away from the didactic or instructional.”

Shenal’s Pearl appears as a globular cluster, a radiant sphere burning from the center of the composition. The image evokes a contemplative mood, as the white center of the mandala is girdled by a constellation of blue atoms. The sacred overtone of this image, as in all of Shenal’s work, is a function not only of its ambiguity but the symmetrical ordering of the composition as well. The warmth of Aureolin entices one into its mysteries, its central image softly emerging from the mottled ground like an apparition.

The ambiguous nature of Shenal’s images is a means to break down subject matter, to underscore the experiential aspects of art. She cites as an influence the work of light and space artist Robert Irwin. She especially is drawn to his assertion that “in our pursuit to quantify and categorize everything, we miss a lot.” Irwin’s own work is very much preoccupied with getting to the core of perception, and Shenal’s pictures mirror that aim by creating images that are at once visceral and enigmatic.

Lewis has developed a most unusual technique to create his distinctive images: Playing off of the landscape tradition of photographers like Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and others, the artist uses a large-format camera to photograph the floodplain of the Mississippi River from a fixed location. But tradition gives way to innovation as the artist literally moves the camera back and forth during lengthy exposures that range from 15 to 40 minutes. The distortion that takes place only accentuates the horizontal bands that characterize the floodplain, and the artist accomplishes feats of color and form that are surprisingly painterly.

The five photographs of the floodplain differ very little from picture to picture, which somewhat disappointed some visitors to the gallery. Generally, each image consists of an expanse of pink sky above a mixture of red umber and tobacco brown, parted at the horizon by a ribbon of dark lavender. One of the most lovely aspects of the photographs is the rich saturation of color, and if one is patient enough to give them their due, the peculiarities of each image reveal themselves.

Standing before Lewis’ northeast 1:41-2:02, the picture elicits an experience of space that is mesmerizing. In some regards, the dissolution of the particular through the movement of the camera has the effect of communicating a feeling of atmospheric depth that a straight photograph could only illustrate. Interestingly enough, I was reminded of being moved in a similar way a few years ago by a painting by Mark Rothko at the Brooks. Each band of color seems to occupy its own spatial vicinity, and they vibrate in relation to one another in much the same manner as Rothko’s rectangles.

Certainly, much of the impact of these images owes to the scale and presentation of the chromogenic prints. Both Lewis and Shenal have abandoned traditional mattes and frames in favor of mounting their photos on aluminum and Plexiglas, respectively, floating them above the surface of the wall. In this way, the effectiveness of color is maximized by not being placed behind glass. Lewis was particularly picky about the installation of his pictures, insisting on new movable walls and windows blocked so as to restrict the amount of sunlight entering the gallery. This obsession with presentation has paid off, and the new wall space will no doubt prove useful for future exhibits.

Through April 22nd at Second Floor Contemporary Gallery.

A couple of other artists around town seem to be playing with form and space as well. The new work of Mark Rouillard at Jay Etkin Gallery and Pinkney Herbert at David Lusk Gallery offers a fascinating spin on their respective painting practices. Rouillard the realist and Herbert the abstractionist seem to be inching their way into each other’s territory.

Rouillard’s new series of three paintings is titled “Reflection,” which indeed isolates the reflections of boats on the swirling waves of a lake. By restricting his composition to the surface of the water itself, the object per se gives way to the dissolution of form, and the resulting images could be mistaken for abstract paintings. Once more, in each successive picture, the painterly quality becomes more accentuated and details give way to a broader handling of marks. As always, Rouillard is the consummate craftsman, and even as his strokes become more painterly and loose, all his characteristic grace is left intact.

I am shocked and tickled pink (no pun intended) by the new work of Herbert, as his painterly impulses move in the direction of illusionistic space. Don’t get me wrong. The artist’s gestural proclivities are still there, but several new innovations truly create a feeling of depth. Herbert has taken to painting on burlap, and the coarse surface really suits his working method. It is especially luscious when he buries portions of the burlap’s texture beneath a swath of impasto, while leaving plenty with just a thin wash. A sense of depth is also created by vague references to imagery such as bodies, hair, and whatnot. I love that autumn palette as well.

I am truly pumped by the kind of innovation and risk-taking that all of the above artists have brought to their art-making practices. Support your local artists by going to see these shows. They are as good as you might see anywhere.

A new exhibit at the Jay Etkin Gallery offers the photography of Jonathan Postal and the watercolors of James Starks, in what is being dubbed “The B Show.” The theme developed from several shared pet subjects: boxers, burlesque queens, and ballerinas, not to mention that the two artists happen to be buddies. But, the stale B routine aside, the pairing is perhaps more of a study in contrasts.

Postal has been a photographer for more than 20 years, working on editorial and fashion assignments in New York, Milan, London, and elsewhere. While maintaining a career as a commercial photographer, since 1989 the artist has cultivated a following with his art photography, recording images of humanity that aspire to an archetypal timelessness. Postal gleefully tells a story about how during a previous exhibit an elderly woman insisted to Etkin that in 1934 she had dated a man depicted in one of the photographs, unfazed in her conviction even after being informed that the image was contemporary.

The manner in which Postal makes a picture can be traced to the ideas of the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Inspired by the automatism of the surrealists, Cartier-Bresson championed an approach to photography that emphasized capturing the essence of a particular subject by framing the picture at the so-called decisive moment. As such, none of Postal’s photographs are staged or cropped after the fact. This “what you see is what you get” approach is accentuated by the fact that the whole negative is printed, so that each image includes a black border and the film’s sprocket tracks, a practice that Cartier-Bresson initiated.

There has always been something offbeat about Postal’s images; perhaps it is because they often evoke a seedy and even voyeuristic attitude. It is this quality that one notes in Baptist: Crying, in which a parishioner holds a handkerchief up to her sad face. It seems to be a scene that would be considered too intimate to document, something of a trespass, and is unsettlingly reinforced when one recognizes a fellow voyeur peering from the margin of the photograph.

Unfortunately, not every picture drips with the raw immediacy of Baptist: Crying. In pictures like Bronco McKane, in which a man is captured in a patented boxer stance, and the blandly frontal Blind Mississippi Morris, nothing seems to distinguish that particular moment from any other. Don’t get me wrong, there is some fine work here, but part of the let-down is that Postal’s past exhibits have had a more indelible impact.

Infrequent appearances notwithstanding, Starks is esteemed as one of the most gifted artists in the region, perhaps best known for his oil paintings. Three such works are present in the current exhibit, and while they have been around Etkin’s gallery for quite some time now, they are still a treat to behold. For the uninitiated, the artist seems to subject the surfaces of his canvases to extreme torture: scumbling, scuffing, and sanding them into submission. By the time the painting is finished, one can get lost lingering over the luscious topography.

The newest offerings, however, are watercolors, and the artist’s handling of the medium is just as distinctive. Starks favors a sort of crass graphic style reminiscent of Georges Rouault, as in Beautiful Girl in Garden, in which blunt outlines define the image of a nude woman squatting among flowers. As in all of the works on paper, the drawing is rendered loosely and fleetingly, but even when the artist is being a slouch, there is panache in the quality of his marks.

Boxer in Yellow Trunks is a good example of this lazy confidence as well, where the facial features of the caricature dissolve into the murky wash. Starks seems to be interested in an almost childlike approach to his subject matter, simplifying form to create memorable symbolic figures. This carefree attitude brings a unique freshness to works like Because You Are Not Special, where a silly face in profile looks to be drawn on a whim, uncontrived and devoid of any pretension, then saved from the scrap heap for this exhibit.

Color is utilized to set a mood, and it is represented no better than in Boxer in Blue Trunks. Here, a swamp of earthen washes serves as the ground for an almost fluorescent blue gouache that silhouettes the figure, a technique that mirrors some of Starks’ use of opaque color to veil and isolate passages in his oil paintings. In most cases with the works on paper, color does not define form, as its watery spontaneity serves as a counterpoint to the chunky drawings.

“The B Show” features some very nice work by both artists, but since it recycles several older pictures, the potency of the exhibit is undermined somewhat. Ever since Etkin moved into his larger digs, it seems to be more of an ordeal to deliver cohesive exhibits, as a greater quantity of work is required to fill the gallery. Certainly, there must be a better solution to this problem than to just dust off old work.

“The B Show” through April 24th at Jay Etkin Gallery.