The tingle of the unexplained
Though a new exhibit features mainly representational art, the works often evoke a sense of mystery spun from a barely implied story.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published July 29, 2004
TAMPA - Hear "biennial" and you may think of those sprawling shows organized by the Whitney Museum in New York every other year or the even larger international ones in locales such as Venice, typically packed with cutting-edge art that leaves casual observers scratching their heads.
Brad Cooper takes a different approach to his biennial, which recently opened at his eponymous gallery in Ybor City. Because of limited space, predilection and pragmatism (unlike a museum, Cooper's in the business of selling art and has to be sensitive to the marketplace), this exhibition avoids provocative conceptual art, sculpture and video installations.
From 150 applicants, Cooper chose about 50 artists from around the country, including a handful of international artists and local ones. Featured are paintings, mixed media and works on paper, a broad range that accommodates photography, drawing, digital prints, lithography, pastel and watercolor.
Cooper's preference for representational work and technical virtuosity is evident in his choices. Also apparent is his affection for the suggestion of mystery and elusiveness, conveyed more often by composition and color than subject matter. Almost everything in this show hints at a story waiting to emerge.
A lush corner of a garden is detailed by Carolyn Neely's Shelter. Flowering ginger plants shroud a construction that could be a house but, because of the plants' scale, we know is much smaller, perhaps a bird feeder. Except that the mass it shelters isn't readily identifiable as avian and has a slightly sinister quality about it.
Stephanie Maria's painting, The Feast, has a table laid with candelabra that sits in front of a complex background, scratched and marked like a cave painting, with dim outlines of stags cavorting. More distinct is a stag in the foreground that seems to leap from the table toward his brethren. Everything, including the chandelier hanging above painted in ghostly white, is evanescent, like a dream about to be unremembered. Or a meal that was never consumed.
In Bruce Erikson's genre scene, a man leans over a bathtub, washing the feet of someone, gender unknown because the painting stops at that person's knees, which are parted. The man is balding, pot-bellied. His arms have little discernable musculature, but the flesh tones are rendered in warm, Renaissance golds and browns that glow against the white rim of the tub and a dark wall. It's a glimpse into a private moment, but whether it's charged with lust or compassion is unclear.
With even more narrative is Roland Delcol's Without a Caption 3, a portrait of the late, unflappable Alfred Hitchcock, seated, fully clothed, observing a surprised and shocked nude woman. The encounter takes place in a flowering landscape. It's the Garden of Eden, at the moment Eve encounters the sly serpent, in this case Hitchcock. In case you need the point underscored, he's sitting under a bunch of bananas, near phallic-looking bushes.
Small-scale works by Mary Connelly and Brian Haverlock are also loaded with nuance. Connelly's oils, deliberately brushed on the canvas with short, heavy strokes, recall Edward Hopper, more so because her interiors glimmer with color and contrast even while they project loneliness and isolation. Haverlock's gemlike graphite drawings enhanced with oil paints are loaded with iconography. Unlike Connelly, his exquisite draftsmanship betrays not a single individual stroke of brush or pencil.
The show has many more discoveries, such as Clare Malloy's deceptively simple Girl With a Note, a charcoal drawing that uses mass and void to psychological effect, as does Armin Muhsam's Tunnel, a broad stretch of pavement with tire tread marks that leads the eye toward a hard-angled wall built to contain a grassy field. The sun shines in a blue sky but also casts shadows along one side of the wall that prefigure the dark mouth of the tunnel ahead. In G.C. Williams' Sculpture in Red, fruit glows against a black background, luminous as if painted in egg tempera on wood but skillfully rendered in oil on linen.
Some of the abstract work is almost more accessible, simply because it is more easily categorized and discussed with a common vocabulary. Helena Rubenstein and Alex Espalter-Torres soak their canvases with paint and expressionist moodiness. John O'Connell and Nancy Handelman tantalize us with almost-perceptible images that dissolve and emerge among, in Handelman's case, graffiti slashes of paint and, in O'Connell's work, textured layers that reinforce a sense of decay and ruination. John Gregory's visceral watercolor and ink drawing of a truck distorts perspective and crops the image, homing in on the details of giant, straining components working at a construction job. You can almost hear the noise of the noise.
"Tell me where is fancy bred," asks Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice, "Or in the heart or in the head?"
The same can be asked of creativity. Shakespeare answered his own question: "It is engendered in the eyes." Well, yes, and so is art. But, like love, it's still a mystery.
-- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com
REVIEW"2004 Biennial Juried Exhibition" is at Brad Cooper Gallery, 1712 E Seventh Ave., Ybor City, through Sept. 25. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday or by appointment. 813 248-6098. To view all works in the exhibition, go to www.bradcoopergallery.com