Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Art

Artful imagination

Works by well-known contemporary artists are on display at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art in Largo. Or are they?

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published July 23, 2006

Sometimes, the joke's on us.

And sometimes that's good.

In the case of "The Emergent Garde: Engulfed," Diran Lyons' installation at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art, the "joke" is a punch line that invites us to be partners rather than victims in its cleverness. And beneath that cleverness are several interesting ideas about art and artists in general.

The gallery contains six works that seem to be by six artists.

Charles Gaines, known for his confrontational works, is represented by a canopy bed dressed in yards of soft white fabric, onto which a video of a beautiful sleeping woman is projected. The effect is peaceful, soothing. Without warning, a cacophony of sound makes us jump and the woman is assaulted by a pair of hands strangling her. Loud voiceovers of financial pitchmen downloaded from CNN accompany the violence. The interruption ends abruptly. The woman sleeps again. But Gaines, a provocateur, keeps us unsettled, and this work will continue to release that jarring soundtrack at random moments, never failing to startle.

Pia Fries uses complex color combinations, often mixing washes with thick impastos surrounded by lots of white space. Here, Fries is represented by a large canvas dotted with random-looking ovals of pastel-tinted caulking.

The late Felix Gonzales-Torres was well-known for minimalist art with powerful emotional subtexts. His most famous work was probably a photograph of an unmade bed, blown up and displayed throughout New York, called Untitled. The bed was in real life the one he shared with his lover, who died of AIDS six years before Gonzales-Torres' death. He created interactive installations consisting of piles of prints, plastic and, most famously, wrapped candy. Viewers were invited to take the pieces, slowly depleting the works, which were then renewed at the end of each day in a death-and-rebirth cycle. This exhibition has a multitiered wedding cake tilting like the Tower of Pisa and about to crash with gravitational finality.

Donald Lipski is celebrated for his witty use of found objects. He has done a lot with trees, living and artificial, including planting a large branch curved in what looks like a yoga position. Here, a huge, living elm limb cantilevers horizontally from a wall, re-creating another yoga position.

Katharina Grosse is an abstract painter who uses spray guns to cover walls with soft undulations of color that can "bleed" onto the gallery floor and anything else she might put in its way. A Gulf Coast Museum wall is similarly blanketed with fluorescent spray paints in a kaleidoscopic pattern that reads as slightly psychedelic and out of focus.

Those are the artists you think you're seeing. In truth, it's all the work of the sixth artist, Diran Lyons, a young teacher at Hillsborough Community College who lives in Brandon.

Among the many implications and risks of such overt homage is comparison between the younger artist and the objects of his admiration. And maybe a sense of letting oneself off too easily as an artist. This approach proclaims nothing so crass as a blatant ripoff, though it's clearly an appropriation of spirit and intent, done with a wink to let us in on the subterfuge.

But it works, because added to the references to these artists are original interpretations and extensions. The work attributed to Fries, for example, only vaguely recalls her in its built-up swirls of pink, green, yellow, blue and caramel paint with their thin outlines, arranged in patterns at first not apparent. It's about any painter who has to make his work relevant in the 21st century. The painting is a puzzle, a dilemma, that resolves itself by playing a numbers game.

The wedding cake is a tangential reference to those sweets Gonzales-Torres made famous and to the autobiographical nature of most of the late artist's work, pervaded by a sense of mortality. Gonzales-Torres would probably never have used something as elaborate as a cake in his art, so we extrapolate its connection to his spare installations, their wistful longing for permanence and the cynical reality of its impossibility.

Braving the Storm, a final work in "Engulfed," is Lyons' alone, without the filters of other artists' visions. It's also the most overt in its message. In a series of photographs and a video, people dressed in white converge on a beach with paint guns and cover themselves with splashes of color and frolic on huge, multistriped floats. If you keep up with the news, connect the dots between a certain Hillsborough County commissioner and the rainbow symbolism.

The exhibition is, in the artist's words, "an allegory of a group show" and an acknowledgement that all art practices illusion in some form.

Another exhibition contains a group of portraits by Edgar Sanchez Cumbas. The artist has exhibited frequently in the Tampa Bay area, and we have come to recognize the gnomelike men who preside over spare, mystical landscapes. These new paintings are all based on a circle that the characters inhabit, sometimes dominate. Most of the characters are more confrontational than in Cumbas' previous work, towering and glowering, occasionally simian.

The paintings are difficult to place. A wall text lists artists who have influenced him, and that list in turn influences the way we look at his subjects, maybe detracting from our own discoveries. Yes, I can see echoes of Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Francesco Clemente and others.

What impresses me about them is the way he uses a dark line - neither too thick nor too thin - to define his figures, then fleshes them out with a pale, eccentric mix of color that suggests and denies real flesh.

The paintings' subject matter presents cryptic contrasts between the spiritual and material, too. In Mind and Matter, the man's beautifully elongated finger and elegant toes are at odds with their ghastly pallor and blotches of red suggesting blood. He sits on a log with a crudely painted monkey. The foreground is littered with fish carcasses. The man, seemingly sated, points to a blue bird perched on a limb with feathery branches sprouting from a gnarled stump. Beauty and ugliness, in Cumbas' world, are not opposites so much as two sides of the same coin.

In a few instances, the figure tries to break out of the circle. One foot in Sacred Step, Secret Move reaches down for solid ground beyond the constraints of that circle. He's about to land on a brown blur suggesting unsteady ground. Know your place in the world, it suggests, or risk a fall.

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

[Last modified July 22, 2006, 10:19:14]