Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
LENNIE BENNETTMiguel Arguello's and Natasha Gray's desert paintings are, by turns, sweeping and subdued.
DUNEDIN - Any Poetry 101 student probably has encountered Wallace Stevens' poem The Idea of Order at Key West. (Hang on, there's a point to this.) It deals with a lot of ideas, but the main one is what happens when our thoughts and perceptions try to bend reality, sort of like in a dream.
That same process seems to be what Miguel Arguello is up to in a new exhibition at the Dunedin Fine Art Center. His paintings are part of "Simultaneous Realities," a three-person show with work by Natasha Gray and Maria Dolores Gregori also on view. Arguello and Gregori are Spaniards; Gray is Mexican. All share a slightly haunted sense of place as well as similar muted palettes.
All are accomplished, though Arguello is clearly the brightest star. In the center's main gallery are eight large oil paintings, the product of 10 years of living in a camper, absorbing the light and landscapes of the great Western deserts, plateaus and canyons.
Like the Hudson River School painters, his landscapes aspire to a monumental realism. Unlike those of 19th century artists, Arguello's are tinged with melancholy; the splendid solitude found in natural grandeur has yielded to isolation, like an Edward Hopper painting moved out to the wilderness. There are some of the same blending techniques favored by Hopper, images that are, in Stevens' words, "ghostlier demarcations." You don't see much evidence of people - a graveyard in one painting, what appears to be a lone cinder block in a dry creek bed in another. The great sheets of rock and sweeps of sagebrush are silent and still, more like ideas of themselves than realities. The only thing that seems to move is water as it cascades through the Grand Canyon, a silver sliver of realism in a landscape of recollection.
In style and tone, Arguello's influence is obvious in Gray's paintings, though they are sometimes a little too academic, too studied. The two artists are married, and she followed him to the desert where she, too, found inspiration. Her works are more intimate and specific, mostly interiors of desert dwellings. Like Arguello's, they are uninhabited, but even the still lifes have a sense of movement. Curtains stir, dried fronds spiral around cactus and cow skulls like fading ormolu. The best work is a landscape with the same soft blending of colors as Arguello's though she is developing something new in the foreground, inserting a specificity absent in her husband's work, planting a spiky bloom curling up to the sky, shimmering with sunlight.
Gregori is something of an anomaly in the trio; her paintings are much smaller and about as close to abstraction as landscapes can get. In contrast with Arguello's and Gray's preoccupation with arid spaces, Gregori's are full of water, stretches of it in harbors drenched in mist, rain or fog. Docks, boats and buoys are suggestions floating in the darkness, with dim lights diffused and shimmering reflections. It's all very Mood Indigo.
What all three create in their own ways is what all artists do, though sometimes less obviously, what Wallace Stevens wrote about: "the maker's rage to order," and order as we perceive it. It's easier to follow when things are ordered in a more realistic way, but the viewer's eye is being manipulated nonetheless. Which is more than okay when, in the "arranging and deepening," (Stevens' words again) you glimpse something true.
REVIEW: "Simultaneous Realities" is at the Dunedin Fine Art Center, 1143 Michigan Blvd. through Oct. 12. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday; 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, and 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday. Free admission. (727) 298-3322.