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Erasing misconceptions
[Photos courtesy of Kevin Bourgeois]
The Dilemma of Hindsight, part of a show by Orlando artist Kevin Bourgeois at Galleries at Salt Creek in St. Petersburg. |
By LENNIE BENNETT
© St. Petersburg Times
published November 14, 2002
Orlando artist Kevin Bourgeois' work helps dispel the label of pencil drawing as simply an ''illustrative'' medium.
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ST. PETERSBURG -- When art began, where and with whom we do not know. But we can date the first discovered works of art to about 30,000 B.C. when unknown artists used charred wood to draw images on cave walls in southern France.
In some later cultures, drawing was a primary vehicle for artistic expression. But by the Renaissance, western art deemed drawing a handmaiden to painting, a visual form of note-taking that served the finished work. Still, well into the 20th century, mastery of form and line in drawing was honored and considered proof of an artist's inherent talent (read early apologists for Pablo Picasso, who stressed his youthful, representational draftsmanship).
But for the past 40 or 50 years, drawing as an art form has been wrapped into the pop-art vernacular and its progeny, such as Japanese anime. Or it has been considered "decorative" and "illustrative," dread words in the art world.
Drawing in a traditional sense was recently affirmed in a major way when the Museum of Modern Art opened an acclaimed exhibition of 26 young artists whose works seem to signal a return to a stylistic medium that was discredited for years.
Tyranny of Substance, pencil on paper
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A new show at Galleries at Salt Creek featuring drawings by Orlando artist Kevin Bourgeois is not groundbreaking like its New York counterpart, but it demonstrates the power and prowess of pencil and paper in talented hands, and that drawing can hold its own against any medium.
Bourgeois, 33, is largely self-taught. That insularity from academic influences is good and bad. He probably avoided a lot of attempts to redirect his interest toward more fashionable kinds of art. But he perhaps has missed out on a more formal, studied exposure to ideas and associations that would have given his accomplished technical skills a little more ideological sophistication.
But taken on their terms, these drawings, with a few mixed-media pieces added, represent three years of thoughtful work and honed technique.
Most of the drawings have a remarkable density, in the way Bourgeois applies graphite and in the way he layers images that pay homage to a gamut of artists and styles, from da Vinci to Rosenquist. His figurative work is beautiful, so meticulous you think at first you are seeing a manipulated black and white photograph. But look closely and you see the crosshatches, pointillist dots and scribbles. He works on heavy, smooth archival paper that looks textured because of the passages from favorite writers he applies with a light hand, like a literary wallpaper.
Bourgeois chooses standard themes: preoccupation with appearances and materialism, for example. His base image is usually part of a body, often part of a lovely woman's face, perfectly made up. From there, he creates collagelike jumbles of overlaid images in less detail that create thematic and stylistic contrasts.
In Windows of a Thousand Blind Eyes, a baby's face is the central image, placed off-center, its right eye an empty socket overlaid by lines that look like a rifle's crosshairs. Two buff adult bodies intersect in the upper left corner. In the lower left is a crudely drawn gear shaft. Slithering around it all is the outline of a snake, its scales magnified in another area of the drawing as an abstract element. It's a roiling work of free association that channels the surrealists and pop art.
Anatomy of Irony is really the antithesis of an ironic work. Half the paper is dominated by a man and a woman with movie-star glamor sharing a kiss. Bourgeois has given them surgical masks and drawn a fuel pump over those. On the other half, he has painted a silhouette of Charlie Chaplin. A lot is going on at different levels. Sexuality has become sterile and forced, something we censor and revile even as we glorify it -- the same sort of love-hate relationship Americans had with Chaplin. That this star of black and white film is rendered in glorious technicolor while the couple who look like a publicity shot for a MGM musical are in black and white is another contrast. It's a work of earnestness and humor, but it lacks the cynicism needed for irony.
And that lack of irony is probably the reason Bourgeois' forays into more conceptual art are not as successful. Many of those pieces -- an Apple computer symbol cutout laid on top of a computer circuit board, for example -- lack the finesse of his drawings.
Windows of a Thousand Blind Eyes, pencil on paper
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Bourgeois' experiments with color are much better. At Play in the Fields of the Lord is one of his rare paintings, and it's good. Lushly painted lips part for a phalliclike tongue, while nearby rose petals cover part of a torso. A brightly outlined full-blown rose blossom is superimposed above, and in the background are laboratory flasks and baby bottles.
This show is heartening to see, as a showcase for a talented young individual who deserves attention from collectors (and good for Lance Rodgers, founder of Salt Creek, for bringing it in) and for what it says about the value of drawing.
The line connecting early limners to those of today isn't a straight one, but it endures.
Review
"E:Volution," work by Kevin Bourgeois, is at Galleries at Salt Creek, 1600 Fourth St. S, St. Petersburg through Dec. 6. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Free. (727) 894-2653.
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