John Hartman’s painted cities are the ones parents tell their wide-eyed children about, the astounding metropolises formed by almighty rivers and buildings that ignore gravity as they make their way to the moon. They’re Oz or Xanadu’s pleasure dome.
It’s been said that beautiful photographs of destruction and human suffering make us uneasy, partly because of the difficulty most of us have reconciling beauty and misery.
Welcome back, color.
With the worship of sociopolitical polemics and high-minded conceptualism and supposed death of painting at the end of the 20th century, color became something of a quaint anachronism.
Sharp-eyed satirist, deft observer of the natural world, accomplished draftsman, frenzied expressionist—as an artist, John Alexander is hard to pin down. In his 40-year career, he has gone through periods in which he’s turned a critical eye on the social and political scene; years when he’s dedicated himself to honing his drawing skills to the level of an Old Master; times of painting lush landscapes, bursting still lifes, and churning seascapes; and an explosive phase in the late 1970s and early ’80s when it seemed he was about to transform into a full-blown abstractionist
The Venice Biennale is just like any avant-garde art exhibit. Everything is a bit strange. Some things are beautifully strange, some fascinatingly strange, some incomprehensibly strange, some horribly strange.
In French they are called objets trouvets, or found objects. In Europe and America, they are those quaint, poetic and typically vintage little things that some people collect as curiosities. Artists incorporate them into sculpture, or sometimes into paintings. But in Cuba, where most people missed the last half-century of Western consumerism, the vintage castoffs that became found objects in the West were never cast off in the first place.
NOW, ASK YOURSELF, honestly, what kind of art would you imagine you would find when you read that an exhibition involving Waters and Flood was opening at the Arthur Roger Gallery this month? As the second year of post-Katrina consciousness is now underway, I imagined that I would find a gallery filled with personal reminiscences constructed from the debris that littered the streets or photographs of people and places that had survived or not, or perhaps some before and after scenes. As a matter of course I visited the gallery website in preparation for my visit and, oh, was I surprised to see that the exhibition has nothing to do with Katrina or disaster or recovery or other such themes.
There’s nothing new about working at the intersection of art mediums, especially pieces that combine aspects of both painting and sculpture. Take, for instance, those bas-reliefs from antiquity. Since they are three-dimensional, they’re technically sculptures, but because they were meant to be viewed from one side only, they’re actually more like paintings.
Willie Birch is a New Orleans-based artist whose exhibition Celebrating Freedom: The Art of Willie Birch is currently on view at New Orleans’ Contemporary Arts Center.
In his acrylic and charcoal paintings such as The Barber Shop, Willie Birch explores the people and places that define old New Orleans neighborhoods.