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LENNIE BENNETTWorks from the New York Studio School evade strictures of style and terminology, freeing the hand and mind to capture what the eye and the imagination see.
ST. PETERSBURG - You don't often see a group exhibition held together simply by its intent. "Searching for the Image: Six Artists from the New York Studio School," organized by the von Liebig Art Center in Naples and at Eckerd College's Elliot Gallery, showcases a handful of painters.
But, perhaps inadvertently, it also promotes the rigorous aesthetic of the New York Studio School, a small institution for graduate students who want to pursue, without distraction or apology, the traditional mediums of painting, drawing and sculpture. You paint, draw, sculpt what you see, period.
On the other hand, you won't find formulaic landscapes and still lifes here, either. The artists range far and wide over their canvases, flirting with abstraction in some instances, hewing to more formal narratives in others.
A point this show really brings home, though, is that the argument of abstract versus objective is becoming boring. To paraphrase Graham Nickson, the dean of the school, the big issue for every painter is how to get into the rectangle.
Color is no bit player here. From the modulated tones of Elisa Jensen's austere landscapes to the slightly lurid juxtapositions of pigment in Miles Collier's beautifully composed mise-en-scenes, color liberates many of the images from their objective constraints.
Ron Milewicz's New York Harbor, a tiny jewel of a painting, owes its monumental feel to its treatment of void - huge open sea and sky - and to the shadowless glow of yellow that permeates it. It is a sunny day distilled that does not sacrifice the context of a specific place.
Pola Wickham uses a similar trick in Sadie on Kilim, which takes a commonplace scene, dog resting on rug, and, against our expectations, refuses to attach to it either meaning or mystery. We don't really care what the rest of the room looks like or that the dog's name is Sadie. The world for the moment is the patterned rug, sensuous and angular, hogging most of the canvas in a diagonal sweep, anchored by the dog lying on a different diagonal.
It's a painting that draws us into that moment and that mildly claustrophobic rectangle. The wrinkle is a literal one, a slight ruffling of the carpet that pulls us to the foreground of the painting and to a time outside the moment when someone will stumble over it. If there's such a thing as surface complexity, this painting has it.
The most startling work comes from Clintel Steed, whose very personal interiors are, like Wickham's, stylistically claustrophobic. Life happens in a room's flat, planar surface with window views that look more like a painted scene on the wall than an extended reality. Objects have import in these paintings, the fan or the book that will witness joy and sorrow but tell no tales.
Steve Cope's paintings of balls levitating and defying gravity are the most single-minded of the group, but they embody the essence of this show: the triumph of the image. The landscape in Cope's paintings is important only because of its interaction with these extravagant orbs, so carefully placed that they seem incapable of existing without each other.
The show is enhanced by drawings the artists made, some as studies for their paintings, some, such as Cope's 6 Blocks and Wickham's Sant Pere: Open Window, as standalone explorations of form.
David Cohen, a teacher at the school who wrote the catalog essay, quotes French poet Paul Valery in trying to describe this kind of representation: "What modern man wants is the grin without the cat."
Inside the rectangle, life waits to be arranged, and the artist chooses what to put there and the way he wants us to see it. Before the Cheshire grin, there's the cat. These artists collectively acknowledge the importance of both, with the understanding that it's the grin that makes us smile back.
"Searching for the Image: Six Artists from the New York Studio School" is at Eckerd College, 4200 54th Ave. S, St. Petersburg, in Elliot Gallery, through June 6. Gallery hours are 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday. Free admission. (727) 864-8211.