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Brave new perspectives

Two artists' new works hint at exciting, bold excursions into creative paths they have not previously traveled.

ST. PETERSBURG - Denis Gaston and Leslie Neumann could not be more different as artists. But in their exhibitions of recent work at the Arts Center, both bring new texture to their surfaces and a sense of freedom and adventure to their subject matter.

Neumann, who uses the challenging method of encaustic painting, has always created dense surfaces, layering molten wax over oil paints to create luminous, mysterious landscapes. I confess to an ambivalence about her paintings from the 1990s and into this century. I admire their technical expertise, yet find the scenes of mystic rivers and vapor- or fire-swathed trees repetitive. Half of the Everett and Stanley Galleries is devoted to those paintings, and seeing them lined up on the walls en masse didn't change my mind.

But some of her newest work is very fine in its move toward abstraction, and, in other instances, a more precise figuration. An odd combination, you might say. Yes, but interesting and brave, too.

Navigating a New Course startled me with that kind of juxtaposition. A triptych, the central panel holds a round painting in blues and off-whites that depicts a scene from ancient Asia: a man in a sailboat is being propelled forward by wind blown from a cherubic head swathed in clouds. It looks like a Ming Dynasty plate (except for the Renaissance cherub, which reinforces the slightly off-center sensibility). Two flanking abstract panels are almost, but not quite, mirror images. They are distillations of some of Neumann's past thematic preoccupations - flames, vapors and smoke taming verdant greens, but without the old literalness. Their beauty is in their suggestiveness. And after coming back to the central panel - which at first put me off - several times, I began to like it very much; the encaustic of its background is handled with subtle finesse and, yes, its literalness is completely different from her forest-primeval scenes.

I'm not as enthusiastic about Central Park, another triptych, which has the same format - a realistic central panel, this of a bare tree, bracketed by related abstract paintings. It's a wintry scene, but its companion panels suggest life welling underneath and within the tree as deep greens snake upward from earth-tones in graceful swirls. Lavender brings the hint of spring.

Neumann likes visual punctuation marks in her paintings. In the past, her vocabulary has included flamelike bursts of white, American Indian imagery and single words. Sometimes, as in the case of Navigating, which uses colorful streaks and clear sprinklings of wax for such an effect, they work. Sometimes they don't. Thick wax overlays shaped like triangles and looking like shark's teeth are a distraction in Central Park. So, too, are the words scratched into the lavender wax.

Language is tricky for an artist to pull off in art. Ed Ruscha is usually able to do it, for example, because the words become the art. And Roy Lichtenstein's overblown cartoons with balloon captions work as part of his pop drollness. But embedding "cherish" and "dream" or "defy" and "deny" into an already eloquent canvas seems like sentimental overkill.

The best painting is Haiku. The two-panel work in muted tones is a luminous abstraction worked with restraint and confidence. I hope there's more of that to come from this talented artist.

In only a year, Denis Gaston has produced about a dozen remarkable mixed-media pieces that bear many of his signatures - quirky self-portraits and economical brushwork, for example - laden with new import and lots of texture. Layer upon layer of paint is piled on the backgrounds, sometimes combined with sand. The delicately rendered drawings have been ramped into big, bold faces staring at us.

Gaston writes in his artist's statement that the pervasive theme of the show is the body as a vessel, and he uses varied imagery to that end. Vasa is a clever composition of overlapping conical shapes - many like coffee cups and bowls, merged into a face. It has a cubist sensibility without a sense of fragmentation, painted in grisaille monochromes.

Nexus Tornado presents us with another transparent head and shoulders. A whirlwind hovers above, contained within a bright spiral of yellow. The human "vessel" is empty, and whether the tornado has emptied or is about to fill it is unclear. Like all these works, the background is heavily worked, with lightly applied paint covering the canvas like the dense dust of a desert storm.

And then there are all the eyes. In Tornado, several circle around, a visual "eye-of-the-storm" pun. They recur in Vasa and decorate a figure in As Above So Below like peacock feathers. They are watchful presences with a disturbing omniscience.

Several of the paintings have the primal, evocative feel of ancient cave drawings, their heavy, simplified forms worked on surfaces roughened like old stone. They, like the other works here, are a successful partnership of form and content. After years of good work, Gaston appears to be headed to a new level of excellence.

-- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com

"Denis Gaston: New Works" and "Leslie Newmann: Mystic Guideposts - Navigating a New Course" are at the Arts Center, 719 Central Ave., St. Petersburg, through June 25. The 13th annual All-Florida Juried Exhibition is also on view. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday (open Friday until 8 p.m.); noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Free admission. (727) 822-7872.