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Idiosyncratic mastery  

Visitors to the L.A. Art Show will be in luck: they’ll get a rare glimpse of Daniel Sprick’s work, who has been included this year in the lineup of painters at Arcadia Contemporary’s central booth. Arcadia usually serves more or less as the LA Art Show’s tent pole. It’s nearly unavoidable as you walk in. You can spend time in the booth and then really can’t escape it until you head back to the parking lot. You move out in various directions only to walk past Arcadia’s sprawling space on your way to see work on the other side of the building. Sprick’s paintings are a rare treat. He had an astonishing, definitive solo show at Arcadia a couple decades ago where he painted various scenes from his studio. Objects for him are arranged carefully to create a formal composition but his skeletons and tools and tightly bound fabrics find their place in your field of view so haphazardly that the scene looks as if he’d discovered it rather than set it up. The light in one of his paintings is liquid,  offering just enough illumination to offer precision, but rarely bright. His handling of paint in that show was flawless and tactile, bringing to mind the gifts of Gerhard Richter and even Velasquez. His skills haven’t faded. He’s able to make random arrangements of tools and objects in a studio look as if they are perfectly situated to convey exactly the quality of light falling on them through his studio windows.

There are dozens of other opportunities for awe at the Arcadia booth this year. Once again, guy-in-charge Steven Diamant is exhibiting an amazing quantity of masterful painting, all of it idiosyncratic, some of it quite strange and dark (stopping just this side of morbid here and there), some just the opposite, bright and affirmative and flush with vitality. Much of the work offers hyperrealistic depictions of time-shifted dreams from an indeterminate past, a transposition of slightly antiquarian styles or objects into the present, a visionary esthetic that has found a welcoming dwelling at Arcadia. John Brosio continues to depict low-rent locals or storefronts unwittingly providing a foreground for apocalyptic landscapes behind them. Occasionally he cashes in on the potential for amusing ironies in these hermetic dramas.

You feel you are gazing into a snow globe where a couple shakes might stir up a few tornados rather than snow. Adam McGalliard, in painting after painting, juxtaposes splendidly lush bucolic scenes with a figure clothed in an antique-looking spacesuit. Like a pre-Raphaelite Ophelia, his drowned subject, young and beautiful, floats, nearly submerged, in a blooming marsh, face up, eyes closed behind her helmet’s bubble of glass. Michael Chapman gives us strangely aimless, remote-feeling urban scenes, lonely even when populated with human figures, the way Hopper’s always felt. Now and then, an Albers square appears or a lost circus bear makes a cameo appearance, as if each of these paintings were a John Irving novel.

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Stephen Mackey offers more of his unsettlingly Gothic visions of fey children and skull-or-animal headed chimeras, not threatening enough to be visualizations of night terrors but weirdly almost soothing, the way I would imagine a vampire’s request to come inside for a bit.

Other painters take postmodern liberties with similar time-shifting but without the surreal fevered reveries. Patrick Kramer’s images offer a postmodern reprise for historic artwork: Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa, brilliantly copied, but on further study it’s incomplete and falling apart:

in the tromp l’oeil reproduction it becomes clear that Gericault’s painting is peeling away like wallpaper from a surface behind it. In paintings with an exquisitely finished surface where mark-making has been completely effaced, Mary Jane Ansell presents, in different settings, a young woman in a suggested narrative, sometimes as a sort of Joan of Arc with hints of a vast army behind her. The contrast between the contemporary girl-next-door beauty and the antiquarian narrative and costume intensifies the impact of both the portrait and the setting. Jong-Jae Kim offers a second nod to Edward Hopper in the show:

a reprise of Early Sunday Morning, a small town’s depopulated street with its long row of windows and doors, a sort of Hopper 2.0. Stephen Foxsubmits his astonishing drive-in movies: still images from easily recognizable films like giant nightlights glowing under dark skies in surviving drive-ins, a few cars assembled, sometimes a little lightning in the distance beyond the screen, a venue in many places still stubbornly drawing viewers willing to burn the gas needed to attend the showings. Alberto Ortega is well represented with multiple versions of his twilight and night scenes painted from dioramas he constructs himself, often with accessories—figures, buildings—from supplies for model railroad hobbyists. As with Chapman, Ortega’s scenes include

the egg-shaped cars with rounded fenders from seven or eight decades ago. His appear along haunted residential streets with people who seem to be dazed by the dream he’s created, fixed with indecision or intent on half-hearted errands. Shaun Downey’s assiduously hyper-real portraits of women seem to float outside time; the styles of hair and clothing, the glamourous ook of the faces almost suggest mid-20^th century starlets, surrounded by flora blooming in such profusion they seem to inhabit that botanical

medium like air or water. Downey, like many of these painters, seems to be saying yes to what he most wants to see emerge as he paints, regardless of whether or not it fits with anything anyone else is doing in the art world. This ideosyncratic choice applies to many of the painters at Arcadia. It’s a choice that Thiebaud made before he emerged, when he finally decided after much anxious deliberation to paint subjects others would have thought trivial or frivolous; the same choice Inka Essenhigh made before she became as one of the most original painters working today.

The show is also replete with portraiture, figures, and still lifes each suggesting a world firmly recognizable but no less oneiric, as Bachelard would have put it. Floral paintings are a difficult feat, and many representational painters don’t have the patience for it. All of the floral work is impressive in this booth, but two examples are exceptional: Daniel Bilodeau’s peonies manage to convey exactly the texture and color of new peonies as they are just starting to bloom. The tissue-thin petals in his work are immense achievements of sustained observation and handling of his materials. His enlarged images of flowers are really cornucopias, celebrations of nature’s abundance, but they are constructed with a remarkable acts of sustained, assiduous attention. Jonquils and narcissus are extremely hard to paint effectively as well; the required variations in white and yellow don’t yield readily to a quick easy shortcuts. Jane Beharrell captures them in a simple still life that will remind everyone of the season about to return in a couple months.

Mary Sauer, Miriam Hoffman, and Kesja Tabazcuk offer quasi-traditional portraiture but in each case the painter’s consummate skill and originality of vision make the sitter’s identity nearly inconsequential: the painting itself holds your attention because of the life it conveys. Each of the three artists handle paint quite differently but with skills so advanced the work looks as if it revels not just in the painter’s abilities but in the quality of the paint on the surface. Anne-Christine Roda’s image of a young woman wrapped in a white blanket could pass for a lost, newly discovered Zurburan, the work is so refined and so old-school Spanish–without looking at all dated. Dana Saltzman’s image of a bowl filled with water and a cloth, sitting on uneven ceramic tile bearing a faint blue pattern, is equal to anything Richard Maury has done in still life. Sung Eun Kim’s twilight city streets evoke the gritty romance and beauty of an American city’s ceaseless, impersonal energy, and Caren Wynne-Burke’s architectural facades with sky compete respectably with Christopher Burke’s rooflines.

The fair runs through Feb. 23, plenty of time to check it out this weekend. You can view all the Arcadia work in this online catalog: Arcadia, LA Art Show.