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Art

Local finds

Two Tampa galleries with a flair for contemporary works put their appreciation of the creative front and center.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published March 24, 2005

[Bleu Acier]

Pierre Mabille, Untitled, from the “New York Series,” 2001-2002, ink and acrylic on paper.

	[Covivant Gallery]
	Jennifer O’Malley, from the “Life Support Series,” 2004-2005, digital print.
	Ulf Rungenhagen, Susanna in the Garden, 2005, collage and acrylic on paper.
	[Bleu Acier]

TAMPA - Away from the nebulous buzz of the proposed downtown arts district (excuse me, the River District), sit two galleries that most cities with creative aspirations would crave.

Covivant and Bleu Acier, in Seminole Heights, are both owned by independent-minded women. Carrie Mackin and Erika Greenberg Schneider have had obstacles in keeping their businesses open, as many galleries do. But remain open they should because they offer contemporary art that is always interesting and often very fine.

Though there is, for the most part, nothing startingly new at either, the current shows fall into the "very fine" category.

Covivant has organized "No Dumping," a group show of Orlando artists, and "Box Full of Autumns," work by local artist Joe Griffith.

The potential arbitrariness of using Orlando as the exhibition's organizing principle resolved itself into a central idea which Mackin says was serendipitous rather than intentional.

I see it as habitation, explorations into how we live in our homes, our workplaces, even our own skins.

Take Jennifer O'Malley. Her sexy lingerie, tucked and beribboned, is made of pig intestines. Offal used to make a point, perhaps, about the awfulness of a culture obsessed with appearance. Her strapless sheath of metal plates - wouldn't it look fabulous in chiffon? - is as formidable as a coat of knightly chain mail. We suit up in all kinds of armor, she seems to say, camouflage that provides immediately recognizable codes.

She suits people up in a series of digital prints, too, using slings, hoods and wraps that partially cover her subjects who sit on sofas. Even in relative domestic security they need protective covering. O'Malley positions the men and women off-center so we see a lot of blank wall painted soft green, yellow, blue or white. It could be openness or emptiness.

Pat Greene's video installation is a chatty dream sequence that attempts to re-create those random, odd scenarios we try to hold onto as we wake up. Connecting his process with the way the Kennedy assassination investigation was handled is bizarre for sure, but we live in a time of homeland security when we wonder if we are safe anywhere.

We all know by now that painting is once again a hot medium after several decades of being edged out by "new" media. (A lot of people are also saying drawing is the new painting but we'll get to that at Bleu Acier in a moment.) So Alix Soubiran's traditional portraits seem fresh and relevant. Like the other artists, she deals in banal, everyday moments, but she gives hers a tweak more than a twist. Bizarre Love Triangle sets up a narrative between a man, a cat and a crow. The composition, too, is triangular though off-kilter. The man, in casual clothes with the soulful face and lanky hair of a Renaissance prince, looks at us from a red folding chair, its angular metal frame a reiteration of the overall design. The lower points of the triangle are anchored by the cat and crow. The cat eyes the man greedily rather than its usual prey, the bird, and the bird only has eyes for the feline. To the right, a luminous curtain billows. It's like one of those sweet, 19th century mise en scenes but for the imbalance of the painting itself and the odd connection between the man and the animals.

Kyle (no last name given) uses office plan blueprints, with their grids of cubicles and pods, as a starting point for three-dimensional constructions. In R&D, three groups of tiny plastic figures are seated around a monolithic blob in a cage. Each group faces a man with arms outstretched like a preacher who stands in front of a person on a stretcher. In each group, at least one figure lies on the floor. The point about some man-made catastrophe is obvious, maybe too much so, but the industrial landscape as toy town, the small scale that still conveys vastness, are cool conceits.

Dana Hargrove's installation of bland white tract houses and kidney-shaped pads of blue plastic simulating swimming pools is lovely in its postmodern sternness even though it's a moral metaphor for suburban conformity we have seen before. But its clever title, Titled, makes up for a lot.

Remember nursery rhymes, those comforting mantras that often had their genesis as chants dealing with a threat or perceived evil? Brigan Gresh and Drew White give them their adult due on panels coated with Mother Goose feathers (a take on tar and feathering, perhaps). Gresh's precious little constructions of found objects illustrate the complexity of those rhymes such as Ring Around the Rosy's references to its supposed plague origins. White's paintings of stuffed animals are like an anime version of Goya's Black Paintings in which a teddy bear sits in total darkness but for a menacing line of smoke and fire on the horizon.

A few miles away, Schneider has taken a seedy old building and turned it into Bleu Acier, where she lives with her family, works as a master printer using her collection of 19th century presses and presides over a small gallery. It all feels very European, probably because Schneider spent so many years living in France.

Her current show, "Art Plastique," includes two European artists, Pierre Mabille and Ulf Rungenhagen, whose work has not been shown in the United States, along with Neil Bender, a faculty member at the University of South Florida's art school, and Steve McClure, a recent USF graduate who now lives in New York.

Bender was recently seen in the "Florida Focus" exhibition at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art, and, with more of his work on view here, you get a better sense of what he's up to. Earlier I mentioned the soon-to-be-a-cliche observation that drawing is the new painting and you understand why in Bender's ambiguous narratives rendered mostly in pen and ink, sometimes gilded with splashes of paint and gold leaf. They are elaborate doodles, all surface flatness but with depths of figuration. Pardon that artspeak, but imagine Italian Renaissance sketches - fluid, lyrical lines - combined with Hieronymus Bosch's unsettling fantasies.

Sometimes Bender piles on repetitive images - sexual organs are common - and sometimes he unleashes myriad individual ones spilling together in weird associations. Whether you can decipher all of them or not, they are extraordinary examples of draftsmanship.

Rungenhagen, who typically creates huge, three-dimensional installations of papered images, here deconstructs them in small, jewel-like collages. Susanna in the Garden, based on the Bible story, combines a shapely pair of legs and terra cotta pots clipped from a magazine with the leering face of an elder from an old print with a suspiciously long nose, attached to a pear. It's backwashed with thick paint, giving it a floating, detached effect, making us voyeurs along with the old man who violated Susanna's privacy.

McClure's watercolors simulate old, damaged photogravures. They, too, are small in scale. He often leaves a portion of the paper unpainted, giving it the appearance of a silhouette or a portion of the print that has deteriorated and disappeared like so much history.

Mabille was once a landscape painter who has spent the better part of a decade refining out specific representational references. He's pretty much crossed over to the abstract frontier with networks of rainbow-colored lines resembling radio waves superimposed with elliptical shapes that could suggest many things or nothing. He might seem anomalous to this group of storytellers but in his way he, too, spins a yarn with his flowing threads as a surface narrative.

Bender, who happened by Bleu Acier during my visit, commented that art has become so politicized. I can't think of a time when art hasn't been used in some way as a pawn of the status quo or an agent of change. That's why it matters so deeply to us, why it's important. Museums are generally the caretakers of art; galleries are its incubators.

Perhaps Bender's big wall painting of a pink boat, with some of his drawings pinned up to suggest a sail, is a good metaphor for the exhibitions at both Covivant and Bleu Acier. If art is only a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sea, it's still the kind of make-believe you want to believe in.

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

"No Dumping" and "Box Full of Autumns" are at Covivant Gallery, 4906 N Florida Ave., Tampa, through April 3. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday and by appointment. 813 234-0222 or www.covivant.com

"Art Plastique" is at Bleu Acier, 109 W Columbus Drive, Tampa, through April 24. Hours are 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday or by appointment. 813 272-9746 or e-mail bleuacier@verizon.net

[Last modified March 23, 2005, 15:26:45]