{"id":8335,"date":"2018-12-20T21:23:23","date_gmt":"2018-12-20T21:23:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=8335"},"modified":"2018-12-21T10:05:50","modified_gmt":"2018-12-21T10:05:50","slug":"intriguing-work-at-main-street-arts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=8335","title":{"rendered":"Intriguing work at Main Street Arts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Bradley<\/a>
Life Is (And Isn’t) Meaningful, acrylic on panel, Bradley Butler<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Over the past few years, Bradley Butler has been doing a marvelous job in Clifton Springs of creating some excitement about visual art in this region. Playing hard to get to may be part of his gallery\u2019s cachet: it requires a bit of time to get there from either Syracuse or Rochester. It\u2019s almost always worth the drive. This new Small Works exhibition offers work from 103 artists, residing in 26 states, chosen by Rick Pirozzolo, executive director and curator at the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, NY., with great work from many regional artists, along with a sampling of representative work from across the U.S. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bill Stephens and Bill Santelli both offered first rate paintings: Santelli\u2019s Awake in the Night<\/em><\/a> was a departure from much of his usual style, a small black monolithic canvas bisected by an aperture through which a new light seemed to break through. With Into the Deep Woods, <\/em><\/a>Bill Stephens has laid down some of the most effective color I\u2019ve ever seen in any of his precise, surrealistic improvisations of natural forms and human figures. The warm tones hover in the background while the vegetation in the foreground of his dreamlike copse were done in cool blues and greens\u2014the inversion of warmth at a distance and chill tones up close made the background seem to advance as the foreground receded. The effect was to create a unified sense of potential energy, everything poised, ready to change places as soon as one looked away. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The masterful and restrained Self Portrait<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> by John Van Houten, of Buffalo, winner of Best in Show, is actually Tonalist in spirit, so dimly lit as to require some moving around to see through the glossy shine of the surface in order to simply make out the face. It evokes long-lost virtues, a quiet and humble sort of patience and forbearance and modesty, and the image served almost as an emblem of core values seemingly abandoned in our shrill and combative social media culture. It\u2019s gratifying to see a painting without a trace of modernist or post-modern pretensions getting top honors while holding its own as entirely and justifiably contemporary. Nearby, Rubicite Earring, <\/em><\/a>by Zach Koch, was a simple but eerie evocation of a weirdly serene but ominous rapture: a face in which the features seemed to be masterfully drawn and then blurred, except for the nose and the gumdrop stone affixed to the beautiful subject\u2019s earlobe. The bright translucent red of the earring\u2014like a trompe l\u2019oeil drop of blood or Kool Aid\u2014is echoed by the blank, zombie-ish red glow that replaces her eyes. It sounds ghoulish, but the effect is subtle, seductive and captivating\u2014which makes it all the more disquieting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pirjo Berg\u2019s <\/a>oils on paper, reminiscent of Gerhard Richter\u2019s dense and multi-colored abstractions executed with squeegees and deep layers of paint, were nearly colorless, by comparison with the German master, but they effectively suggest both motion and electronic media\u2014the blur of a culture moving so quickly forward that everything melts into a virtual blizzard of horizontal lines. Elizabeth Courtney\u2019s This Green Place II <\/em><\/a>uses heavily and loosely worked impasto, a bit like Stanley Lewis, but more faithful to the actual look of the wooded, remote glimpse of summer pond she depicts with great skill. The sky is slathered on with a knife and yet it has exactly the energized, gorgeous brilliance of summer, the sort of light Van Gogh wanted to convey in his glimpses of southern France\u2014the sort of light that is such a distant memory now, close to the darkest day of the year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alex Gruttadero<\/a>, himself a local curator, has finally done what I\u2019ve been thinking for quite a while that someone needs to do: portraits of Lego people. There are so many interesting ways to make it work and he\u2019s found the most straightforward: a loose, assured depiction of one with a sweep of forelock and handlebar mustache, complete with cupholder-shaped hands. It lives in that zone where some of my own work lives: a subject suitable for Pop Art but done in a painterly way, lit with feeling, as if he\u2019s just caught the little fellow on his way to another eight-hour grind at his plastic office. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of Chad Cleveland <\/a>\u2019s three offerings, two seem inspired by the spirit of Edgar Allen Poe\u2014a crow (rather than a raven) and a skull\u2014but both are executed with such painterly energy they felt like Jungian celebrations of psychological complexity and depth. I kept returning to the one that merged a human face with the silhouette of a crow, the two sharing the same eye, that divulged its roughly rendered intricacies only to sustained, patient observation. And several of Connie Ehindero\u2019s<\/a> encaustics are probably the best argument for getting in your car and showing up in person for the exhibit: there\u2019s no way to convey in a photograph the sort of uniquely beautiful color only encaustic can achieve\u2014more than any other medium, it\u2019s thick translucence gives it the quality of flesh or murky stained glass, with light reflecting back from multiple layers. It\u2019s the best argument against Walter Benjamin\u2019s thesis\u2014and Warhol\u2019s for that matter\u2014that the manufacture and mechanization of art so often means the singularity of an original object itself no longer matters. The only way to actually see what Ehindero does with her medium is to get as close as you can to the actual work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eventually, as usual, I wandered upstairs and happened on a couple paintings that could easily have been a centerpiece of the show\u2014but weren\u2019t actually part of it. They were virtually hidden in one of the side rooms, an afterthought that will serve as a sort of rare Easter egg for anyone curious enough to seek them out. They were a pair of small oils by Bradley Butler, director of the gallery, and thus wouldn\u2019t have been eligible for the exhibit, but could easily have won the top prize. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most powerful is an acrylic on panel entitled, amusingly, \u201cLife is (And Isn\u2019t) Meaningful.\u201d <\/em>It\u2019s nearly as crepuscular as the prize-winning self-portrait downstairs, but more colorful and with more dramatic effects of light. One of my companions at the show read my mind: \u201cIt looks very Asian.\u201d Yes, if you were to take a Chinese scroll painting, turn it sideways, and let Turner whip up a version of the landscape at midnight. It\u2019s entirely done in black and a sort of phosphorescent blue, with a massive Gibraltar-like promontory in the misty distance rendered in purple. It immediately looks like a stormy, Romantic shoreline\u2014opening for Poldark <\/em>in storyboard\u2014but with small touches of white and a scumbled plume of it in the center of the painting suggesting foamy, breaking wave crests and moonlight just starting to peer over that massive mound shaped like one of those Chinese karsts featured in Sung dynasty landscapes.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The effect the painting achieves is remarkable. All the detail is entirely imaginary, in the mind of the viewer, because the surface itself is little more than boldly applied, directional brushstrokes, or smudges of twisted paint layered on top of a previous quick coat. I couldn\u2019t help thinking of the twisted, tiered branches of West Coast cypress, though there\u2019s nothing to indicate any of that in the black sections over at the right. The painting is all about the flowing brush, loaded with paint, but the result is haunting and evocative and mysteriously specific. Just beyond the horizontal, rocky spit in the foreground, where I imagine gnarled roots being pummeled by water, rises that looming, glowing mount that conceals the moon and seems itself to evaporate into the sky. It\u2019s like a glimpse of next year: I\u2019m certain something interesting awaits me there, but I can\u2019t quite know what it is. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This new Small Works exhibition offers work from 103 artists, residing in 26 states, chosen by Rick Pirozzolo, executive director and curator at the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, NY., with great work from many regional artists, along with a sampling of representative work from across the U.S. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[261,23,260,17,262],"class_list":["post-8335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bradley-butler","tag-contemporary-painting","tag-main-street-arts","tag-painting","tag-small-works-exhibition"],"yoast_head":"\nIntriguing work at Main Street Arts - represent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=8335\" \/>\n<link rel=\"next\" href=\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=8335&page=2\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Intriguing work at Main Street Arts - 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