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ART LTD-NOV/DEC 12 COVER_ART LTD -JAN/FEB12 COVER 10/26/12 6:25 AM Page 1 KARL BENJAMIN DESERT INITIATIVE U.S. $5.99/CAN $6.99 Nov/Dec 2012 www.artltdmag.com MARCO BRAMBILLA SEATTLE “ELLES” JAY DeFEO ART LTD-NOV/DEC 12_ART LTD-SEP/NOV 88 10/26/12 4:32 PM Page 33 Louis Grant, well known for his celebrity and That sounds simple enough, but “complex sports portraits, ventures here into racial his- paintings with strict limitations” like tory, portraying middle-class black life of the Scene, Redacted, Slide, Sprockets and 1920s through the 1940s with a blend of so- Pink Twist (all works cited 2012) belie their cial realism, magic realism and abstraction: modest size and refuse to sit still. (They Reginald Marsh, Henri Rousseau and Arshile also defy easy photographic capture, Gorky come to mind. His modestly prosper- incidentally). Clues given by composition ous subjects, undoubtedly taken from old (overlapping planes), color (glossy versus photos, preen and pose in their Sunday best matte black and dark gray) and painterly in Cafe Zanzibar #2, Eddie with Latest Car, nuance (the “grain” of repeated brush- Two Sisters After Church and even Cranky strokes, the tape ridges where paint has Little Girl with Parents. The paintings are built up) agree in places, but they also con- nostalgic, almost mythic. Arthur K. Miller ex- flict in others, or they’re ambiguous, so plores movie culture, but without the irony that space seems situational as in Cubism, or social critique associated with Pop Art: expanding or collapsing depending on his paintings meticulously duplicate in Tech- context and location. Dark areas read as nicolor the black-and-white glamour photos voids, but also as weighty; white grounds, produced by Hollywood’s Dream Factory for too flip from presence to absence. That theater posters, fan magazines and (as I re- perpetual oscillation, says Voisine, is “the member) amusement-park vending air that activates the space of the paint- machines. Errol Flynn, dressed in Sherwood ings. That’s where the paintings breathe... Forest green, aims an arrow; Bette Davis, charged, resonating with implied speed, Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe pose, curve and thrust... [that] seem to extend ,JSL%PVHMBTBT7JODFOU7BO(PHI -VTUGPS alluringly; James Dean and Marlon Brando beyond the edges of the picture plane, -JGF Arthur K. Miller reprise their indelible roles from East of shifting perceptions of scale and perspec- "DSZMJDPONBTPOJUF Y Eden and The Godfather, respectively, tive.” Behind the paintings’ stately 1IPUPDPVSUFTZ(FPSHF,SFWTLZ(BMMFSZ flanked by non-thespian members of our na- facades, things are stirring. Strangely, while there is a threatening qual- tional—bipartisan?—pantheon: Custer, Poe, —DEWITT CHENG ity—there are plenty of scalpel-sharp objects Houdini and Kerouac. Conceptual humor for OAKLAND to be found—or fairly gross subject matter, the artsters, and celebrity glamour for the “Hidden Agenda” the overriding playfulness of the scenes civilians: to appropriate a movie title, Some- at Vessel Gallery dampens any visceral reaction; it’s all just thing for Everyone. “Hidden Agenda” at Vessel gallery high- devilishly good fun and make-believe. Addi- —DEWITT CHENG lights paintings by Rose Anne Critchfield, tionally, the gallery walls were altered—with and also features sculptures by Alex Abajian peeling wallpaper, dripping paint, and the SAN FRANCISCO + J. Lin-Hsien Kung, Luke Heimbigner, like—to resemble an interior like one might Don Voisine: “Paintings” Wayne Shaffer, and Cyrus Tilton. All of the find in the photos, and one of the large at Gregory Lind Gallery works in this exhibition display a dedication props seen in several of the images was Pascal’s adage that “All man’s miseries to craft, an interest in organic shapes, mounted along the walls and ceiling: the derive from not being able to sit in a quiet forms, or textures, and a balance of contem- viewer becomes the subject; the fantasy room alone” sounds constricting, but seri- porary and modernist aesthetic. Critchfield’s loop is complete. ous painters know that only concentrated works on panel and linen are laboriously —CHÉRIE LOUISE TURNER practice makes perfect. Brooklyn-based painter Don Voisine came of age during built, and her process even extends to for- SAN FRANCISCO the Neo-Expressionist era, but disliked its mulating her own proprietary gesso to Louis Grant/Arthur K. Miller: arbitrary emotionality. Looking for a motif prepare the surfaces. Bold, graphical compo- “Lust for Life” that would provide structure for his ab- sitions made with materials traditionally at George Krevsky Gallery stract paintings (like Jasper Johns’ “things associated with drawing—watercolor and In “Lust for Life,” two New York painters, the mind already knows”), he began in ink—emphasize the delicate texture of the both veterans of this gallery’s annual sum- 1980, painting from the floor plans of mertime baseball-themed shows, take on places where he lived or worked (includ- the questions of identity, memory and his- ing, with poetic justice, the apartments tory, as preserved by photographic artifacts he painted or rehabbed). Thirty-two years and refracted by painting. The show title later, Voisine no longer needs to rely on refers of course to Irving Stone’s 1934 novel floor plans or architecture books, but his about Van Gogh and the 1956 Vincente Min- paintings retain the feeling of lived experi- nelli bio-pic adapted from it, nicely invoked ence and inhabited space, with all their by Miller’s acrylic painting of a straw-hatted unruly contradictions. Kirk Douglas glancing askance at the viewer (or MGM publicity photographer). If the iden- The fourteen oils on panel shown here fea- tity-politics art of the 1980s and 1990s often ture white rectangular “skies” almost suffered from excessive political correct- completely blocked by large diagonal black ness, the exploration of self by Grant and planes; at top and bottom, horizontal bands Miller might be termed “post-identity” art, (or window sashes, “something you had following the pattern of “post-gay, “post- to ‘step over’ to get into the picture”) of black” and “post-feminist” art. American bright color, accentuated by thin strips of a society and demographics have changed, second color, partially frame the “views.” and the cultural differences around race and gender, once charged with accusation and defensiveness, are now, in the no-drama- 1JOL5wist,” 2012 Obama age, no big deal, for most of us. Don Voisine (At least one hopes so.) 0JMPOXPPE Y 1IPUPDPVSUFTZ(SFHPSZ-JOE(BMMFSZ Nov / Dec 2012 - art ltd 33 ART LTD-NOV/DEC 12_ART LTD-SEP/NOV 88 10/26/12 4:32 PM Page 34 : reviews innocence. This time around, at least, the birds connote a current, living world of pollu- tion and other perils to natural habitats. Instead of cutting and pasting old ads for children’s toys or women’s cosmetics (as in his earlier work), the artist uses Victorian portrait engravings, samples of now-worth- less monetary currency and images of 18th-century ladies and gentlemen to allude to how, in some ways, the rise of the Indus- trial Revolution endangered birds long before our contemporary eco-crimes. Botanic specimen prints background the bird in Art History (all works cited 2012). Cameos of bewigged worthies glare down on a long- legged ostrich in Promenade. Antique travel memorabilia fragments support the bird in 6OUJUMFE ralistic ink texture would be like if projected Baggage. For most of the series, including Rose Anne Critchfield into three dimensions. European Vacation, Passenger and Carnival *OEJBJOL PJM BOE Pelican, the bird is presented at dead center, HPVBDIFPOMJOFOPOQBOFM Y The works in ”Hidden Agenda” display an as if posed for taxidermy or science-mu- 1IPUPDPVSUFTZ7FTTFM(BMMFSZ unselfconscious emphasis on form and ma- seum display. A few, such as Courting, substrate, as if picking up the “tooth” of an teriality in the modernist tradition, but the Signatures, and Little Soldiers, pair male artisanal drawing paper. Her ink brushwork, exhibition as a whole, and Critchfield’s and female together, an effect that is all the while referring to calligraphy, appears paintings in particular, maintain a playful, more ironic or sad in that any procreative entirely improvisational, and results in net- reflective sense of process in dialogue efforts seem ultimately doomed for those works of pattern, wherein the pigment pools with contemporary craft and painting. extinguished by progress. and reticulates. Untitled (2012), and Bunker —MARY ANNE KLUTH 14 (rewrite), (2011), also incorporate areas With a substantial career and numerous ex- where the ink patterns have been filled in or SEATTLE hibitions across the nation in New York City, traced over with richly colored oil paint, both Patrick LoCicero Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, emphasizing the phenomenological texture at Linda Hodges Gallery Washington, DC, and elsewhere, LoCicero’s of the ink and gesso, and reasserting the The 53-year-old artist Patrick LoCicero has ingenious technical formula of collaging artist’s intentional hand, recalling the intense turned his flair for nostalgic collage painting risks being undercut by the predictable cen- mark-making of contemporary painter Xylor to a new series involving endangered and tered composition. That’s why Vase Parade, Jane. The pieces including this additional extinct bird species in his tenth Seattle solo History of the World, and Water Lilies,with layer of intervention best celebrate tradi- show since 1997. His grouping of 21 mid- more widely dispersed elements, suggest a tional materials while still engaging with size oil-and-collage canvases at Linda heartening new direction. LoCicero affirms contemporary trends in painting like accre- Hodges Gallery commemorates and memo- for the first time that his engine of nostalgia tion and highly repetitive marks. rializes obscure birds that summon up can also point to a present, continuing mo- memories of formerly idyllic or Edenic ment of ecological danger for vulnerable Cyrus Tilton’s The Hammer and the Nail worlds in much the same way that LoCi- creatures—and the rest of us.