There is an eye-popping new show of shaped abstract paintings at our airport that are well worth the time to feast your eyes on. The Baltimore art scene is ever unfolding with surprises and delightfully gifted talent of the first order- that considering our modest size as a city, justifies the buzz that is drawing national attention.
Mind you, the airport can be a challenging place to exhibit work. Some shows sing by their moderation of scale and content, others sometime evaporate into banality in the space. Then there are some, like this show, which take risks, end up with problems, but still deliver, in this case, an eight course tactile, sensual, finger tingling array of why painting remains at the epicenter of international art making.
With four artists, Even Boggess, Jeffrey Kent, Linling Lu and the remarkable Steven Pearson presenting one to three works each, they offer up a riot of terse, complex asymmetrical/symmetrical shapes and colors that play powerfully off each other in unexpected ways.
Linling Lu is the elegantly modest one of this group, with off white, low-key raw canvas and linen abstractions that play off of her extraordinay Chinese heritage. Garden Door, (2011) is a fascinating translation, bridging traditional architectural influences while nailing a refined ground of spiritual and soulful presence the traditional American crazy quilt rarely explores. It is fiber or painting? This geometric oval snaps its surface tension of threaded details with a quiet urgency that is enormously different than how similar patterns in paint attempt to convey a concept. It is a moment, even an expectation that is all hushed implication, the kind of under the voice mature sophistication that argues for a related body of such works.
The odd one out in this group suffers unfairly by comparison. Jeffrey Kent’s raw, powerfully painted slogans are a traditional format with extended stick edges, looking here as if he was at a loss to cut the ends. Lets Go,…Let Go (2010) is a direct kind of outsider look that is blunt, direct, of the recluse glibly dependent on one-line texts that uncomfortably orphan these valid works out of the context of the others. Even so, the work is strong and richly, even marvelously painted, the animus of his process exhibiting sly teeth. For all his storm tossed, layered colors and direct/indirect messages, why here? The work deserves relationship.
The show heats up around the three works by Evan Boggess. His multiple bodied, carefully considered shaped canvases are arresting with a powerful balance between a bold graphic intelligence and wit and the slower unfolding of greater details that suck the viewer in like a Greek siren calling a sailor to his death. These look great from the street and pull you through the door and then deliver up close and intimate with the towel snap of a lover. Certain surfaces look very well lubricated. There are some lush, but nasty details that look like an angel almost lost his supper but zapped the slip into a crusted state of beauty. That implication of violence or accident sends sparks of associations across the complex array of contrasting surfaces, shapes and tilted planes.
Here is where I became angry. There are white crowd separators standing in front of all the work and far too close. Nothing suffers greater than Boggess’s potent Sprawler, (2011), which is a remarkable tour de force with winged fire and guts that needs the clear floor space to be seen. It’s gutsy, brilliantly designed array of four leaning panels dance across the wall with a rare authority and bravado that crisply announces that this is an artist to watch. Check out his website. Sprawler is clearly a leap ahead, one of those moments in a budding career where things suddenly fall into a syncopated grace and power.
At the far left is his gorgeous Dermaterra, (2010) a spaceship of a wall work that escapes being cut off at the knees by airport safety concerns. Taking a more moderated value and tonal range, it strikes a marvelous note of complex geometric development that openly offers connections to Linling Lu and Steven Pearson, much like the kingpin that brings in a mutual agreement. At its center it opens to a sweep of implied landscape that wrestles with several contradictions of now you see me, now you don’t, as if it has its own internal Swiss Army knife logic, ready to shift at any moment. That modest, but sexy tad of raw canvas nails a toehold into the Italian Arte Povera movement. This is the kind of abstraction that unfolds at a range of overlapping speeds. Is it vehicle, landscape or body or all three?
What commands the exhibition as a dazzling inferno of kaleidoscopic colors and shapes is Steven Pearson’s enormous The Whole is Greater Than(2011) At perhaps 25 feet long and eight panels, it is overwhelming up close and likely to give some serious headaches to the faint hearted. This is a warrior painting determined to lead the charge. Enormously ambitious and wonderfully balanced in its overall symmetrical shape, it nevertheless gives one ample pause to reflect upon its multi-layered implications and associations. Bite off a chunk and chew awhile. It sustains. Of all the works in the show, this is the one that presents the most arguments. Is he aimed towards the corporate? What does it say about our social network? Our economy? Is this a reflection of the American psyche? At its very center is a curious balance of form and color that seems almost benign. For all of it’s layering, there are sections that are curiously uncommitted. Perhaps the fire of other sections need breathing space. What is certain, there is far more than one can digest in one sitting. How it operates in the mind thirty minutes down the road is very different than the rest of the show. Coming back to its image unpacks new things.
August 11, 2011 - January 20, 2012
Artists' Reception: Thursday, September 1, 2011, 4:30 - 6pm
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