Untitled Document

Baltimore City Paper

July 10 - July 16, 2002
Art Crawl

Charles Street Gallery Hop Showcases a Plethora of Provocative Work

Review By Miike Giuliano

Summer group shows are usually this-and-that assortments, but sometimes you'll find a thematic spine. The three-artist Landscapes of Maryland exhibit at the Craig Flinner Contemporary Gallery may be misleadingly titled--it also features some scenes from Virginia and Pennsylvania--but that doesn't detract from the skill with which Michael Bereznoff, Skip Lawrence, and Michael Kronner render regional scenes. This trio of disparate artists seems to share a sense that "landscape" is a state of mind as much as place, and a disdain for the standard prettiness of tourist-oriented artwork: They paint junkyards as well as fields and streams, and their vivid color choices would look pretty weird as postcards.
For Bereznoff, Maryland means Maryland Avenue in Baltimore City. His acrylic painting "24th and Maryland" depicts two imposing Victorian-era brick buildings that originally served as dormitories for Goucher College when its campus occupied this lower Charles Village neighborhood. Bereznoff invests the painting with enough architectural articulation to give a sense of how firmly these many-windowed structures assert themselves in the urban landscape, but his main interest is in seeing how far he can push a bold palette. This won't raise any eyebrows where the intensely blue sky is concerned, but you may wonder what prompted him to paint a deep blue street and a yellow sidewalk.

Other subjects depicted in paintings and prints by Bereznoff include quietly rural scenes in Chincoteague, Va., and Pocomoke City, Md.; the brightly defined Episcopal Cathedral Church of the Incarnation on East University Parkway in Baltimore; and a rather somberly silhouetted lineup of buildings along a downtown stretch of North Charles Street. Like another painter of Baltimoriana, Greg Otto, Bereznoff takes familiar local structures and makes them seem a tad unfamiliar via striking color schemes. It's obviously a matter of taste, but one wonders if Bereznoff's eye-catching colors are always the right emotional choice.

Bright colors also characterize Lawrence's watercolors. In landscapes such as "Studio Orchard" and "End of the Wood," tree trunks are pink, purple, blue, red, green, and just about every color other than brown. His emotionally colorful response to nature evokes the so-called Fauve artists working in France in the early 20th century. Like them, he also simplifies forms, working with zones of color.

Lawrence's most pleasing watercolors incorporate both clearly defined blocks of color and areas where colors melt into others. In "Yellow Line," that center-of-the-road stripe clearly gives us our bearings in the landscape, but the horizon line is a nice blur of melting greens and blues--pleasing precisely because Lawrence's watercolors are lovingly expressive in rendering the sort of sparely defined place in which there are streets but no addresses.

While Bereznoff and Lawrence favor a pyrotechnic palette, Kronner utilizes duskier hues and more brusque brushwork. The "Junk Yard" series that dominates his exhibited work features piled-up clunkers in a variety of colors. It would be stretching things to say these are beautiful paintings, but they possess a kind of ugly dignity. This is, after all, a fixture of the Maryland landscape.

Occupying the same small strip of Maryland landscape known as the Charles Street gallery corridor, the C. Grimaldis Gallery is in the midst of its annual summer group show. The assortment of old and new work by the gallery's stable of artists is highlighted by Jon Isherwood's brand new Champlain red marble sculpture "Breath Taken," an open-topped vessel-like form that resembles a deflated inflatable soft sculpture. This piece manages to seem both graceful and amusing, and its speckled rose-and-white surface is lovely to behold.

Among other new items on display, Allegra Marquart (often in collaboration with Sharon Wolf) exhibits technically skillful works in carved plate glass and cast glass that present such well-known subjects as Federal Hill scenery in a reductive manner. Statues, trees, and people are simplified to iconic forms cut into the glass.

The group-show format enables you to make comparisons between how Marquart uses glass in her pieces from 2002 and the very different use made of glass by Costas Varotsos in a couple of gridded-steel and blown-glass sculptural pieces from 1992. The wall-hung steel squares are splattered with transparent glass drops that seem like water, poured not carved. Also exhibiting in the Grimaldis show are Peter Milton, Anthony Caro, Eugene Leake, Grace Hartigan, Renée Cox, Sukey Bryan, Ed Ruscha and Raymond Pettibon, John Van Alstine, Peter Shelton, Richard Serra, John Ruppert, Raoul Middleman, and Osami Tanaka.

Gallery International, new tenant of the ground-floor space beneath Grimaldis, proves again with its second exhibit that it's name is no affectation. This show features Spanish artists Reinaldo Lopez-Carrizo, Albert Verges, and Marc Quintana; German Catya Plate; and American Peter Stanfield. Look for some of them to have solo shows during the gallery year ahead.

Especially intriguing are Plate's mixed-media "Clothespin Mandala/Female Cluster" and "Clothespin Mandala/Male Cluster," in which circular, mandalalike wall-hung drawings are bordered by a toothy lineup of real clothespins. The drawings represent nude subjects with drawn clothespins clamped to body parts, including the most private parts. One thinks of acupuncture, BDSM, and God knows what else in this creepy yet compelling work. What really gives Plate's pieces their kick is the conventional domesticity of those clothespins and their ability to also serve more exotic and possibly painful purposes.

Plate's two boxy mixed-medium constructions from a series called "Sanguine Bedtime Stories" resemble medieval reliquaries, but she ups the ante in terms of how she deals with essential body-and-spirit affairs. The faded red tones staining the lace and thread are the artist's blood. If some artists figuratively sweat blood in making their art, Plate extracts her own blood to make hers. This is fascinating "body" art, and one looks forward to seeing more from her--while simultaneously dreading the prospect.

Other works worth pausing over are paintings by Verges in which computer-code-like numerical sequences are placed against abstract backgrounds, as if to suggest that all information (including visual information) now reduces to digits; a Lopez-Carrizo series called "Galapagos" in which sand is added to the paint to give a literally earthy feel for terrain that he otherwise treats as abstracted patches of ground; and Stanfield's wall-hung assemblages made of plastic, metal, meditative texts, and fluid-filled medical vials, which spark thoughts about philosophical links between scientific machinery and the human body. The second effort from this literally underground gallery promises a future of heady shows down below.