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Art

Black and white, yet full of color

A varied show of monochromatic works offers vivid commentary on our way of life.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published September 8, 2005

[Image from Voshardt/Humphrey]

Robyn Voshardt/Sven Humphrey, Smoke and Mirrors, 2005, DVD, 30-second loop black and white video projection, silent.

	[Image from Bleu Acier
	Steve McClure, Parzival, 2005, ink on paper.

TAMPA - We usually think of artists as those who color our world.

But all artists worth their color wheel have at some point confronted the daunting challenge of the monochrome.

How to invest a black line with nuance or find the tonal variations in a dark wash that doesn't sink into a black hole? "Noires/Noirs," an exhibition opening Friday at Bleu Acier, takes black as its theme. The variety of interpretation and method in the works is like black itself, the noncolor that is a blend of all colors.

Gallery owner Erika Greenberg Schneider packs paintings, videos, drawings, prints, installations and mixed media by 20 artists into the fairly small space that is Bleu Acier. The density creates a roomful of connecting ideas liberated from a distracting riot of color.

Schneider, a master printer who worked in Europe for several decades, marshalled work by artists rarely, if ever, shown in the United States, along with fine locals Robyn Voshardt and Sven Humphrey, Elisabeth Condon and Neil Bender.

The centerpiece is a Voshardt/Humphrey video and a wall of paintings that were not made as companion pieces but function contrapuntally. For several years, the two artists have used video as their paint, creating, then manipulating, images that have an integrity frame by frame, as if they were a collection of canvases. As pictures in motion, they become a discourse on how we see any image, whether it is changed by our perceptions or by a natural or mechanical process. In Smoke and Mirrors, footage of smoke curling against a black wall is transformed by editing and layering positive and negative images into a montage that mutates like the chips in a mirrored kaleidoscope.

Paintings made of dots have a similar randomness but not a kaleidoscopic symmetry. They curl delicately across paper as intuitive trains of thought, ephemeral as smoke trailing off into air.

Nearby are boxes by Mathieu Mercier, who represented France in the 2003 Venice Biennale, stacked totemically. He covers them in screen prints of X-rays of human skulls. Think of them as repositories or burial grounds.

Marie Yoho Dorsey's wall installation includes a grouping of sumi-e paintings, a traditional Japanese genre that reduces representational objects to their essences using tonal monochromatic washes. Among the paintings are torn fragments of one, cascading down the wall in a delicate annihilation, and loops of black and white thread acting as tenuous, ineffectual connections. Everything is skewered to the wall with pearl-capped straight pins, a tasteful ouch.

Neil Bender continues to intrigue with sensuous forms that suggest both organs and body fluids. In Black, Tongue-Tied and Licked they are painted paper cutouts combined with a map of Florida, outlined in road-map black and collaged with photographic tangles of arms and legs. Above it rises blue bubbles of sky on which floats part of a Kerry/Edwards election sticker. The body politic is in bad shape, he seems to suggest.

One of the best things about this exhibition, besides the quality of its art, is the presence of young artists along with established ones such as Dominique Labauvie, whose figurative drawings of entwined bodies yield to a portrait of his self-entwined limbs, an artist wrapped up in himself, sure, but also a thank-you note to Matisse in the lovely line of an arm and to Picasso in the angular head tilted like one from his Blue Period, but done in black graphite.

Steve McClure's Parzival is a miniature mural of an elaborately staged scene of ancient warriors, horses real and wooden, nudes, 19th century spectators and other barely discernible figures receding in washes of black watercolor. You would have to spend some time deciphering the images and possible connections with the story of Parsifal, a hero of medieval literature, Arthurian Holy Grail legends and Wagnerian opera, but I don't believe that's so much the point. Whatever the original truth of the Parsifal story, it becomes over time something fictional that we create with layers of interpretation, veiled like those watercolor washes that drip down the paper.

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

Lots of fine art will be on view Friday when three cutting-edge Tampa galleries open new shows. "Noires/Noirs: The Black Show" is at Blue Acier, 109 W Columbus Drive (see review); "Just Say Know," a collection of family portraits in both the traditional and nontraditional sense of family, are at Covivant, 4906 N Florida Avenue; and "Bad Art for Bad People," photography by Bob White, shown above, is at Kama, 2929 N 15th St. All are located in close proximity in the Tampa Heights and Seminole Heights neighborhoods and will be open 7 to 11 p.m. for receptions. Also participating is the Renaissance Center, 2201 N Florida Ave. with an exhibition of art by members and staff. Some galleries will have door charges with entertainment, hors d'oeuvres and cash bar. For information, call (813) 272-9746.

[Last modified September 7, 2005, 09:26:06]