One winter morning in 2001, the artist James Drake was sitting over coffee with the novelist Cormac McCarthy. They were at one of their regular haunts in Santa Fe, N.M., where they both live, chatting about work and family, the kinds of things said idly that lead to other thoughts.
The December Show at Arthur Roger Gallery features the work of Luis Cruz Azaceta, Nicole Charbonnet and an installation by Dale Chihuly.
Of all the reactions likely to be observed among visitors to an exhibition of contemporary art-quiet contemplation, hushed commentary, a smile or a chuckle-a genuine gasp is surely among the most rare. Good art can be beautiful, intelligent, humorous or moving, but it takes something pretty spectacular to cut through the refined atmosphere of your typical gallery and evoke a real, spontaneous expression of astonishment.
The thing I admire most about Luis Cruz Azaceta is that he lets his art change, and change and change again. When he moved to New Orleans 12 years ago from New York, he was already in mid-career, with a big-time national rep for his cartoonish expressionist paintings and junk sculpture installations.
The remarkable exhibition now at the Newcomb Art Gallery — a retrospective of Ida Kohlmeyer’s painting and sculpture — does much to cement her position among our major artists. Curated by Professor Michael Plante, the show clarifies, especially, Kohlmeyer’s commerce with Abstract Expressionism — her debt to certain of the movement’s pioneers and, notably, her singular protraction of its imperatives.
Texas photographer Ted Kincaid, exhibiting concurrently at Arthur Roger, seems to reexplore one aspect of the old Romantic impulse — its penchant for exalting the look of nature. Of course, Kincaid’s methods, it must quickly be said, are decidedly of our time.
Symbolically speaking, Stewart, whose exhibit “Crosscurrents” is on display at Arthur Roger Gallery, undoes some of the damage mankind has inflicted on the environment. She begins each of her paintings by wall-papering a large canvas with a layer of architectural plans or oil field maps — things that suggest man’s encroachment on the land.
All right, so this is not the title of either of the solo October exhibits at Arthur Roger’s two, separate exhibition spaces. Rather, Jesus Moroles’ is entitled “Broken Earth” at the Arthur Roger Gallery Project location, and James Drake’s is “City of Tells” at Arthur Roger Gallery on Julia.
Fans of Ida Kohlmeyer, almost certainly this region’s best known abstract contemporary artist before her death in 1997, have two — no, make that three — good reasons to rejoice this autumn. Or maybe even four, the most immediate being this System of Color retrospective of iconic selections from her vast output.
Robert Colescott’s Interior I, 1991, is a spot-on pastiche of one of Roy Lichtenstein’s “Interiors” paintings: Here are the sterile modern furnishings, the stark outlines, the repeating dot patterns. Yet someone has shuffled in to disturb the otherwise pristine scene–a dark-skinned figure sits on the white couch, his stockinged foot plunked unceremoniously on the gleaming coffee table.