reviews

Gallery promises diversity
New space an exhibit for artists worldwide

SUN ART CRITIC
Glenn McNatt
Published on May 7, 2002
The Baltimore Sun

New galleries seem to be breaking out all over Baltimore this spring. One of the most interesting is the new space opened by Chinese emigre artist Hai-ou Hou on Charles Street, which she has named Gallery International.

Located at 523 North Charles St., Gallery International is on the lower level of the building occupied by C. Grimaldis Gallery, one of the city's premier exhibition venues for contemporary art. The recent arrival, which opened last week in a beautifully renovated space after months of construction work, could bring a synergy to the locale that benefits both venues as well as the entire Charles Street arts corridor.
Gallery International plans to specialize in works by internationally recognized contemporary artists. Its first show, which runs through May 20, presents 35 paintings, sculpture and photographs by 15 artists from seven countries, including Spain, Brazil, China and Norway.
The most familiar artist in the show is probably American Chuck Close, who is represented by one of his signature daguerreotypes and by a limited-edition print of the contact sheet from which he selected the 1968 self-portrait, possibly his best-known image.
In recent years, Close has been experimenting with daguerreotypes, created through the original photographic process invented by Frenchman Louis Daguerre in 1839, which produced a positive image of great beauty and subtlety directly on a polished silver plate.
Close's daguerreotype, a portrait of New York art world figure Bill Barton, harks back to an earlier era in which photographic images were one-of-a-kind objects, like paintings, with their own aura of mystery and uniqueness. The Barton portrait is part of a series of daguerreotypes the artist has completed of fellow artists and friends over the past decade or so.
Close is one of the stars of this show, but there are many others. Spanish painter Jordi Fulla is represented by a pair of striking images of what appear to be geologic fragments painted in a vividly realistic style.
Despite their apparent solidity, these surrealist-inspired objects are visually unstable, so that they seem to float above or even move across the neutral backgrounds behind them.
But the most striking images in the show are surely the trio of monumentally scaled color photographs by Spanish artist Alex Frances, whose work deals with gay life and sexual mores.
These are daring works of imposing size whose potential to shock seems reminiscent of the homoerotic photographs of the late Robert Mapplethorpe.
Yet unlike Mapplethorpe, whose photographs of gay men often evoked images of violence and brutality, Frances seems more interested in portraying the tenderness and intimacy of such relationships.
In each of the three works on display, two male figures embrace each other in gestures that literally get under each other's skin. It's not clear whether the photographs have been digitally manipulated to produce this effect or whether the models were wearing some sort of remarkably life-like costume and makeup.
But the theme of the images obviously relates to the desire of lovers everywhere for physical and spiritual union.
Other artists in the show include Daniel Senise of Brazil, Raul Urruhkoetxea of Spain, Nicola Tyson and Chris Webster of Great Britain, Jon Bon Paulsen of Norway, Pedro Morales and Nela Ochoa of Venezuela, Frenchman Charles Pavan and Ou Yang De Biao, Jia Bao Hua and Tian Guang Hua of China.
Gallery director Hou envisions an ambitious schedule of exhibitions based on her contacts with European and Latin American galleries.
This is a potentially exciting development for Baltimore that holds the promise of bringing a wider range of international artists to the city and promoting high-quality contemporary art in one of the city's most elegant settings.
Gallery International's hours are Tuesday through Saturday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. For information call 410-230-0561.
Darkroom is darkened
Area photographers are lamenting the abrupt demise last month of Photo Works, the 2-year-old darkroom and digital imaging center in Hampden that offered local artists one of the few public darkroom facilities on the East Coast.
Photo Works was the creation of two local photographers, Bob Creamer and the late J. Michael Welsh, who had become frustrated by the difficulty of finding access to darkroom space in Baltimore.
Their solution was to renovate the old post office building at 3531 Chestnut Ave. in Hampden as a combination gallery space, private and group darkroom and digital imaging center.
In recent months the center had been struggling. Welsh died of cancer last year and Creamer left the center soon after. The staff that took over after these changes had excellent technical qualifications but seemed unable to build on the vision of the center's founders.
The loss of Photo Works is a blow to local photographers who depended on the center's excellent rental facilities and equipment as well as to Baltimore, whose cultural life was immeasurably enriched by the vibrant community of artists and photographers the center encouraged. "NK-723 Doucer," by Jordi Fulla of Spain, at Gallery International.

Two of a Kind
Diptychs Dominate a New Show at Grimaldis

May 15 - May 21, 2002
By Mike Giuliano
Baltimore City Paper

I became acutely self-conscious while looking at Bernhard Hildebrandt's exhibit at the C. Grimaldis Gallery. This abstract artist's painting-and-photograph diptychs have such reflective surfaces that I constantly saw reflections of my note-taking self. This mirroring effect is an important aspect of what Hildebrandt's intriguing show is all about.

Although individual works are untitled, the series title, "Stereo," indicates what the artist is up to here. In constructing a typical diptych, Hildebrandt starts by making a polyurethane enamel painting on an aluminum or wood panel. The painting's surface is completely covered with a shade of midnight blue so dark it's nearly black--though it's luminous rather than oppressively dark. Against that blueness, the artist sets only blackish lines and zones that seem sponged on as much as brushed on. Varying a bit from one painting to the next, these markings always remain abstract, although they loosely evoke cellular patterns, honeycombs, or brain X-rays.

"Stereo" finds Hildebrandt eschewing the Jackson Pollock-style splatter effects and milky white surfaces of his earlier work for near-monochromatic darkness and more reflective surfaces. What makes "Stereo" notable, however, is its format. Each densely shiny painting comprises the left half of a diptych; the right half is a C-print photograph taken of the painting and mounted on either Plexiglas or the plastic board known as Sintra.

Although both painting and photo depict the same thing and are identically sized, they create strikingly different effects. The photos were shot in daylight in the artist's studio, which makes for less dense colors, more pronounced if still abstract markings, flashes of bright white light, and occasional shimmering suggestions of the studio's windows and walls. A photograph of a painting by definition conveys a kind of documentary reality, but here the photographic document is itself an exercise in reflections and refractions.

The show's title and its diptych format seem to consciously evoke the stereopticon devices popular in Victorian parlors, in which near-identical side-to-side photographs merged into a single 3-D image when viewed through a lens. It's a somewhat misleading historical association in the context of Hildebrandt's diptychs, though, because the paintings resolutely remain separate rather than dissolving into each other through optical trickery.

There is some optical magic involved in the way these diptychs seem to float against the wall. The supporting aluminum, wood, Plexiglas, and Sintra panels are as thin as the last presidential election margin, and the diptychs are unframed. As such, they seem to hover before your eyes.

Perhaps the only miscalculation Hildebrandt makes in this smart series involves exhibiting the untitled small black-and-white Polaroid negatives that the artist took of the completed diptychs for his own archival purposes. You certainly can make a case for tracking the image-making, documenting, and, for that matter, distorting process through to this late stage, but these smudgy negatives simply aren't very interesting visually. Even so, "Stereo" is impressive.

Elsewhere at Grimaldis, Peter Shelton exhibits cast-steel, bronze, and mixed-media sculptures that are biomorphic abstractions with some overt references to the human head and other organs. Because these wall-hung sculptures are installed so that an average-height person can go head to head with them, you're perhaps even more inclined to make a human connection with the bulbous form in the cast-steel "bulbhead" and wonder about the surreal form of the cast-steel "nipplehead," in which the sculpture can be seen as a breast, a head sprouting a nipple, or whatever else your sense of anatomical whimsy wants to make of it. Shelton's show is pleasing precisely because it offers anthropomorphic possibilities without knocking you over the head with them.

AS YOU ASCEND THE STEPS of the C. Grimaldis Gallery's downtown digs, you may notice that the building's lower level contains a new art gallery. In fact, Gallery International has such a bright red door that it would be hard to miss.

Gallery owner Hai-ou Hou is a Chinese-born artist who received a master of fine arts degree from Towson University in 2000. True to her multicultural background, Hai-ou says she wants her gallery to present a range of mediums and countries. That's certainly the case with this its inaugural exhibit, whose artists come from Brazil, France, the United States, Spain, Norway, the United Kingdom, Venezuela, China, and Uruguay. As you might expect, the maiden voyage is a this-and-that sampling, which makes it difficult to get a feel for where this gallery that aims to span the globe is really heading.

Even so, there seem to be at least a couple areas where Gallery International already exhibits some strength. Photography is well represented; pieces such as "Bill," a sharply detailed daguerreotype portrait by American Chuck Close, and Spanish artist Alex Frances' color triptych in which two wrestling guys really get under each other's skin (thanks to the peeled-back skinlike costumes they're wearing) bode well. Also, there is a sampling of contemporary Chinese painting by several artists--something not often seen in local galleries. These provide glimpses into the architecture, customs, and faces of a society that many of us would like to know better.

This worthwhile group show has been extended through June 20. Gallery International may occupy subterranean quarters, but it promises to take you around the world.