Chicago is famous for its large geometric grid of streets. These streets are the framework for which the city’s rich and diverse population has built its neighborhoods. However, there is another network of roadways that is almost as large and almost as interesting as its streets. A secondary lattice of alleys, overlayed and offset from the streets is where the burg takes care of its dirty business. It’s a place where garbage is collected, parking is accessed and power is delivered. It’s also a place where many acts that aren’t meant for public view are carried out.

As part of its mission to introduce new art, this winter Neoteric Art will publish a book of studies by William Dolan that explore Chicago’s rich and diverse collection of alleyways. Here, we present the next three.

Alley Study 7 with Bricks | digital marker | 10½"x7"

Alley Study 8 with Snow | digital marker | 10½"x7"

Alley Study 9 with Oil Drum Garbage Cans | digital marker | 10½"x7"

I never gave much thought to Mark Rothko or his large colored soaked canvases but with the play Red in town and a planned tripped to Houston where the Rothko Chapel is located I would get my fair share of the man.

Red is about Rothko and a fictitious studio assistant during a two year period when the painter was commissioned to create several large paintings for the Four Seasons Restaurant in NYC. The play was fantastic—full of energy. I tend to forget that painting can transcend time and place. Both the act of painting and being a spectator of the work can be a very spiritually moving event. Red reminded me that painting is very human.

It was then off to Houston and the Rothko Chapel. I didn’t know what to expect except some Rothko paintings and some sort of chapel. The magic was in the conflation. The first thing that struck me was the quietness of the chapel. The stillness was beautiful. I don’t know if I ever equated quietness and beauty before but I do now. And of course there were the paintings. The paintings hovered on the walls. As time passed I felt I was becoming one with the paintings…with the stillness. The whole space evoked inspiration.

Both of these experiences are making me give more thought to Mark Rothko.

A review of Red from Time Out Chicago is here.
www.rothkochapel.org

I came to the auditorium at 112 S. Michigan with high hopes for an engaged debate on art criticism in Chicago and expected a lively discussion about the recent book The Essential New Art Examiner – a republication of seminal essays from the Chicago-based magazine which began in 1974 and ended in 2002. I had been a writer for the New Art Examiner in the late 90s until its demise and was rather itching for a conversation. But this was not to be. There were glints of subjects that could have sparked rich topics of conversation – Jim Yood the moderator had started out by saying the NAE had “challenged authority and power” – but for the most part the panel proved that art criticism in Chicago does nothing of the sort today, and worse still would simply have no idea of what this meant. As far as the conversation went the pot never got to simmering let alone boiling.

For me this is a rather sad state of affairs. I had to wonder how the “elephant” in the room – major issues surrounding art world power, control and impenetrable art theory – remained invisible to most of the seven panelists. What seemed more visible were the “emperor’s new clothes” – art writing that responded to the kind of and inbred art world thinking that pours out of art schools like SAIC. This is the situation that has displaced critical consciousness and inquiry. Perhaps I was wrong to be surprised considering the style of the media and blog-based writing reflected by most of panelists– Jason Foumberg of New City, Abraham Ritchie and Steve Ruiz of Artslant.com and Lori Waxman of the Chicago Tribune.

In saying so I do not wish to overlook the considerable efforts of two of the panelists – Kathryn Born and Terri Griffith- who do not profess art world training but whose indispensable efforts brought the recent Essential New Art Examiner into existence. Students in art departments all over the country retained their old copies of the NAE because they got dynamic art discussions and answers which they could not find on the pages of Artforum or Art in America. We live in a time of commercial and institutional – dare I say corporate – influence which makes independent structures with alternative points of view, like the NAE had once offered, rare and valuable particularly today. Creating the new book is an important step in sustaining this value. One of the panelists, the former NAE editor Ann Wiens, was thorough in discussing the particular 1980s art world background she came from. She was interested in bringing in “lots of peoples points of views” to the NAE and mentioned the time she spent working with the New York art critic Donald Kuspit. Her answers to questions were well grounded and brought a sense of Chicago art history that was useful, stressing the magazine’s importance to the city as the only source “chronicling the work being made at the time “and “interested people who mattered in our community.”

Aside from this most of the discussion was lost in space. I could not grasp the basis out of which most of the panelists interpreted art, and perhaps this is because they write for media formats and publications that don’t demand it. There was the sense that the younger writers are looking for answers but do not know where to find them. In an art world lacking critical consciousness and suffering from amnesia about its history it’s easy for writers to cling to self-reference and the centralizing mechanisms of the mass media. This makes the art world boring and complacent. Plenty of descriptive art writing abounds, but there is no stabilizing force which allows coherent meanings or interpretations to emerge. I could not discern how these writers linked art with human experience or life outside of the artist’s self-proclaimed intentions. Most of the writers on the panel had started their careers after the NAE had disappeared, which goes some way in explaining the loss of a “center” for the discussion of art in Chicago. The NAE was a “town square” to use Ann Wiens’ metaphor, where artists could meet and discuss – it was a focal point for debate. Jim Yood as moderator was talkative and humorous, but his questions offered no real challenges or issues of controversy. Conversation was mostly anecdotal and nostalgic, ever cycling around details of the New Art Examiner’s past without hitting any target of deeper interest or sparking debate. Finally things came to life during the question and answer session by a few older members of the audience. One question brought up discussion of the time when Kathryn Hixson, the last editor of the New Art Examiner, had mismanaged the magazine to the point of bankruptcy and how this continues to remain a sore spot for many who knew how important the magazine was to Chicago’s ever-fragile art infrastructure. The NAE was originally created as a bulwark against censorship “without fear or favor.” In its last days it looked more like an imitation of Artforum.

I was alarmed by the incuriousness of the panel as well as the SAIC students in the audience. The narcissistic attitudes of artists have been deeply inbred by countless art programs over the past 30 years. This has lead, for the most part, to a fairly uncritical acceptance of what is being taught. Donald Kuspit once said we have gone beyond self-censorship to self-ignorance, which makes for quite an Orwellian situation. The framework of power over what is considered art – disseminated from art school to gallery to museum – is effective because it is invisible. For all of the contemporary art world’s claim to being “liberal” and “progressive” it is deeply conservative at heart, and the panel discussion was point in case. Yes the doors to the auditorium were open, but in a sense the public was not really invited. We live in an art world – I would call it a “post-art” world – where meaningful human content and experience is ignored and where the purveyors of culture don’t seem to know the difference and couldn’t care less. That is the real crisis.

Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. She has written for The New Art Examiner Art on Paper, and Dialogue magazine among others. She currently writes for Artcritical.com and Neotericart.com and has written numerous artist catalogue essays. She is a 2002 recipiant of a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and had a 2009 retrospective at the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago in 2009. She is represented by The Kouros Gallery in New York City where she exhibited in 2011. The Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago, the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, and the Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City also represent her.

Ellen Lanyon & Philip Pearlstein: Objects/Objectivity
Valerie Carberry Gallery
Chicago
September 16 – November 5, 2011
www.valeriecarberry.com

Ellen Lanyon and Philip Pearlstein are artist friends who share outings to collect antiques, flea market finds, and vintage toys – the theme on which exhibition title Objects/Objectivity is based. The articles they find inhabit distinctly different worlds in their art. While Lanyon has always expressed an overt emotional attachment to the items that populate her fantasy-based imagery, Pearlstein renders his antiques and toys with a harsh objectivity that can sometimes exude unsettling feelings lurking behind their attempt to mimic life.

Both Lanyon and Pearlstein had technical drawing training early in their careers, which helps to explain a common interest in mechanical objects. Pearlstein’s first job as a machinery draughtsman influenced the stark “objectifying” realism he brought to his nude figures. Mechanical renderings operate somewhat differently in Lanyon’s work, becoming props that mix up and recombined with other objects as though performing on some subconscious theatrical stage.

Lanyon’s work bears some similarity to the art of Seymour Rosofsky and is rooted in the surreal, and fantastic images of the Chicago-based Monster Roster art group of the 1950’s. Lanyon clusters her objects into skewed interiors where one cannot tell exactly where the tiled floor meets the striped wallpaper. All manner of porcelain creatures, gadgets, cards, and items of nostalgia clutter these spaces with a whimsical disregard for logic. They often are energized with a strange, sometimes lugubrious, inner life. The animal presences in her paintings are particularly noticeable and seem to act like the ringmasters at the circuses being performed around them. In one painting a porcelain fish in a red velvet suit glowers at the viewer with its large glassy eye. In another a monkey uses a snake to squirt tea into a cup. Birds peep through windows and spring out of clocks. Animal effigies appear to be the silent guardians of a secret world. Space becomes unstable, topsy-turvy, and surprising. Bright colors burst through the surface in jazzy patterns while other areas are rendered in ghostly outlines. The aura of nostalgia embedded in her objects do not make them “sweet.” They exist in a world that teeters between irrational whimsy and the grotesque. There is a darkness that exists within the sentiment she feels for her objects, which makes them both tragic and imaginative. Like Seymour Rosofsky Lanyon’s scenarios are often haunted by a sense of bittersweet loss that brings both a personal and expressive life to her arrangements.

Ellen Lanyon
Fisch, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 inches

By contrast Philip Pearlstein is well known for his stark objectivity painting the nude. He is famous for posing his naked figures under harsh, glaring lights that emphasize their “objectness.” Their static and somnambulistic expressions prevent the sparking of erotic desire, as does the rendering of flesh with veins, sinew and hair in all its particularity. The introduction of objects present new formal challenges to these figural arrangements. In this exhibit items like duck decoys, puppets, and other toys are rendered in the same harsh and unsentimental light as the nudes. Like Lanyon, the animal effigies in Pearlstein’s paintings act as a kind of psychological lynchpin, looking at us with open eyes where the nude’s gaze does not. Yet humans and objects co-habit a common space with uneasy awkwardness. A “Gulliver” sized foot is lodged on a “Lilliputian” sized model of the White House (a bird house in actuality). Two nudes are surrounded by a jumble of duck decoys that have truly “wooden” expressions. An uncanny deadness emanates from the leering expression of a Mickey Mouse doll on a unicycle, similar to the opaque expression of a wooden rabbit marionette placed between two nudes in a different painting. In another arrangement an old copper butcher’s sign is placed in front of a nude woman, seeming to trap her – compositionally – into a corner. The silhouettes of a knife, cleaver, and saw overlay her body, making her flesh seem all the more delicate and vulnerable. In another painting a model airplane on a vertical flying pole pushes to the front of the picture plane, crowding the foreground and directing attention away from two nudes that are seated below and behind it. The toy plane presents a kind of visual dissonance – a compositional mechanical “noise”- that contrasts with the human presence. Unlike Lanyon’s paintings there is no whimsy, sentiment, or nostalgia embedded in Pearlstein’s items though there are strange juxtapositions that arise between the nudes and objects, sometimes hinting at a surreal otherworldliness. In each case the object’s inner deadness makes the nudes come to life by sheer contrast. His inert animal effigies attempt to mimic life, but their harsh realism renders this mimesis as a strange phenomenon. There is something a bit frightening about the lifelessness in many of these objects that ends up animating Pearlstein’s otherwise pallid figures. The inertness of his articles reinvigorates the sense of human presence in his paintings, and emphasizes the existential fact of their aliveness by contrast.

Though both Lanyon and Pearlstein have interests in nostalgic objects their paintings result in quite different outcomes. For Lanyon, magic can upset the rules of reality and imagination can twist space and memory. In Pearlstein’s work, realist empiricism reveals a disconnection between the human aliveness and unliving matter – rehumanizing the human presence as a result. Both artists have maintained humanizing artistic traditions – whether through Surrealism or Realism – which stands in distinct contrast to the postmodern spectacles and conceptual ideologies of the current art world. This certainly goes along way in explaining the integrity of their artistic survival in these all too dehumanizing times.

Philip Pearlstein
Two Nudes and four Duck Decoys, 1994, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches

Ellen Lanyon
Hanafuda, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches

Top image:
Philip Pearlstein
Mickey Mouse, White House as Bird House, Male and Female Models, 2001, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches

Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. She is a 2002 recipiant of a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant. She had a 2009 retrospective at the National Hellenic Museum in 2009 and is represented by The Kouros Gallery in New York City where she exhibited in 2011. The Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago, the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, and the Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City also represent her.

MDW Fair which had its debut earlier this April ran again this past weekend with the intent of being a bi-yearly event. This time around the Fair—once again on three floors of the GeoLofts building on Chicago’s South side—offered the same high energy and most of the quality venues that were present the first time out. There were also some exciting new exhibitors.

The first floor had the Hand in Glove Conference. As their website states: a new semiannual conference for independent visual arts facilitators working at the crossroads of creative administration and studio practice. This conference was open to people engaged in the pragmatic realities and imaginative possibilities of organizing exhibitions, re-granting programs, publications, residencies, public programs, platforms for projects, and a variety of other programming that challenges traditional formats for the production and reception of art at the grass-roots level.

The second and third floors held the small not-for-profits, artist-run spaces, independent galleries, collectives, curators and publishers from around the country. Strong showings included Erik DeBat at 2612 Space, Paul Nudd at Western Exhibitions, Brian Kapernekas at 65Grand, Tom Torluemke at Linda Warren, Kristina Paabus and Raul Mendez at Hinge Gallery and bookmaking at North Branch Projects.

Let’s hope that MDW Fair will continue and become a driving force in the Chicago art scene.

Megan Euker: Reenactments
Linda Warren Gallery
Chicago
April 15 – May 14, 2011
www.lindawarrengallery.com

The Linda Warren gallery is never stingy with its exhibitions and their heady pleasures. They often appear on the verge of being interrupted by applause. The current show, Megan Euker’s, “Reenactments” holds a familiar fit and pours richly into that trend. Anyone can buy a ticket to ride, but the destination should tug early on. These works do so. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, and it features new works and large sculptures, displaying her critical focus on gesture, body language and the figure.

“Sociology, psychology, acute observation of behavior, deep interest in human interaction and cultural rituals are all things that have impacted my work,” shares Euker. “I have also traveled to Italy many times, which has had a huge impact on my work. I depict a lot of stories from Italy in my paintings and sculptures and almost all of the bathing paintings are from natural thermal baths in various parts of Italy.” She continues, “I think when I get away from my normal routines and habits, I become more acutely aware of my surroundings…how people interact, etc.” She invites us to think about that through these pieces.

Ms. Euker’s periods of living in Italy, on a Fulbright, and her time in Brazil are dramatically captured in this show, from her, “La Mola”, oil on linen with its seductive use of color to her sculpture including, “Chamada”, chicken wire armature with plaster gauze, latex paint, and wood base of two figures engaged in capoeira. The artist trained in capoeira, a martial art developed by African slaves brought to Brazil, heavy with spirituality and physicality. “Athletics are a big impact on my work,” Euker says. “I paint and sculpt in a very physical manner, and I think my history doing many athletics informs how I approach art. I think I have an athlete’s mentality to making work in regards to pushing myself.”

The artist brings a determination, an almost obsession to her work in seeking ways to, “document the moment,” and therefore “make a painting, drawing or sculpture based on the situation.” “I am incredibly interested in how humans interact, touch, don’t touch. So I am attracted to images that are sometimes romantic, sometimes ritualistic or revealing of human nature, she says.” Euker tells the story of her sculpture, “The Calling”, chicken wire armature with plaster gauze, latex paint, and wood chair, part of her “Good Intentions” series. “When I was living in Italy during 2008-9, I visited a church in Naples where I saw a priest answer a cell phone call while a woman was giving confession”, she recounts. “There were about 30 confession booths up and down the aisles in this particular church, and the booths were all open. You could see the priest’s face and torso,” she continues. “It was such an ironic, slightly comical, strange thing to see, and I kept imagining scenarios to explain why the priest would casually answer the phone. In any case, I didn’t make the sculpture until two years later, but I kept thinking about the image and the story in that time…the paintings were becoming too much of an illustration. I started imagining them as sculptures, and I think they really work as such. I related the story to my parents, who dressed in costume and reenacted the story I told them. I filmed the reenactment, took stills, and loosely based the sculpture on these images.” Euker aims straight to her own version of the sublime. “The Good Intentions series represents one of the more idiosyncratic aspects to Euker’s practice”, write the exhibitions curators.

Megan Euker’s work develops into an intimate rapport. Nothing lurking in the shadows of surrealism…nothing hiding…nothing seething with irony. The artist received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005 and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. She lends elegance ot her work with color. Most is done in the service of “realism”. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Artists’ Fellowship, Inc. (New York) and Change, Inc. (est. by Robert Rauschenberg). She is an Adjunct Professor of Painting and Drawing at the College of DuPage.

“I studied a lot with Dan Gustin during undergraduate and grad school, and he has impacted me a lot as an artist. Geoff Barnes was my first painting teacher, and helped in forming the way I paint and teach.” Euker also had studio visits with Jerry Saltz who helped her uncover the essence of what she felt she needed to explore as subject matter.

“A lot of artists have stories about being deeply moved by the work of another artist, and Lucien Freud is the artist that brought tears to my eyes”, holds Euker. “I went to L.A. in, I believe, 2002 to see a retrospective of his work, and that exhibition took my breath away.”
Eric Fischl has also impacted her work. “I like the way he talks about painting and the evolution of ideas in painting, the strange narratives in his images and the speed at which he paints. I think his images are intriguing, both formally and on a narrative level, and I am interested in the dynamics of relationships that he creates between the figures in his paintings.”

She gains power with her dramatic sculpture, and undertakes a transformative process. “When I’m making sculptures, I think of George Segal’s work a lot, because of the everyday-ness of the situations that he portrayed”, Euker says. “I am drawn to the relation of his process to abstract expressionism, the fleeting moments he depicts, and the whiteness of the plaster and its timelessness.
It will be intriguing to watch this young artist/academic’s development, and we eagerly await it.

Peter Allen Hoffman: When the Cathedrals Were White
Thomas Robertello Gallery
Chicago
April 1 – May 21, 2011
www.thomasrobertello.com

With little fanfare, Thomas Robertello recently opened his relocated gallery in Chicago’s West Loop, reestablishing his presence in the city’s art world with an exhibition of Peter Allen Hoffman, “When the Cathedrals Were White”. “I chose Peter’s work for the first exhibition mainly because the timing was right for both of us”, said Mr. Robertello. “It had been four years since his last solo exhibition with me and I feel honored to represent his work. While I could have opened the new space successfully with a group show,” he continued, “a solo show by any of the artists I work with, or someone new, I’m really pleased that his work is here right now.”

The show assumes numerous poses, rolling from order to conscious anarchy, from irreverent and funky to establishment still-life with some works bordering on the Hudson River School. Such is the case in, “Pomegranate III”, oil on linen, with his rich use of deep red and orange on a black background, and, “The Source”, oil on linen, capturing the nature and romance of a tumbling stream through earth shades of beige and green forest.

“I suppose I am a pluralist”, is the voice he paints in. “I am interested in many different things. I try not to separate my life into too many parts,” Hoffman shared. “Therefore, the paintings reflect my own experiences of places I have been and images I have collected, as well as work by other artists. Placement of these ideas and thoughts next to each other and seeing what happens is fascinating to me.”

The artist’s works, however, are more than just picture windows. He challenges and shifts gears. “I think the painting “Untitled”(Red Hook) may give some sort of insight into my process. I was interested in making a painting that contained opposing forces, and yet, looked void or empty,” says Hoffman. “It is almost an achrome. It hung on my wall in my former studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn for a year before I realized it was finished. I find it a very difficult painting. There doesn’t seem to be much happening at first, but it gets more complicated the longer you look at it.” In, “Gambit II”, oil on canvas, the artist presents his abstract language in cool off-white and blues with a bold crimson edge on three sides…almost minimalist. Other of Hoffman’s abstracts provide tasteful glimpses of thick, vigorous strokes.

For the most part, the paintings are 12” x 12”, which the artist tags as, “facial” in scale. “They are to be read like faces”, says Hoffman. “Most people are better reading faces than paintings…which is also why I hang them relatively high.”

Given Robertello’s plans for the new space, Hoffman’s show is a fine re-start. “My new vision for the space and its programming isn’t much different from the old one, at least in terms of goals. As usual, I operate by instinct, a keen eye, and never get involved in the vision or production of an artist’s work,” Robertello says. “I trust them implicitly and I have diverse interests. I’m careful to not influence them during any dialog we may have about their work.”

The curator/gallery owner also shared his intention to turn over the tiny project space of the gallery to Jason Robert Bell for an entire year, a fantastic opportunity. “He will have 6 small exhibitions there, coordinated with shows in the main space, and culminating with a solo show
in the main space next year,” said Robertello. “I hope that my commitment to his work will bring recognition to Jason’s massive genius.”

“I plan on continuing to work at this scale,” Hoffman added, “Yet I will be working on larger paintings as well. ‘When Cathedrals Were White’ is aesthetically pleasing in a fresh way, with spirited moments offering suggestions, and the artist completely in control.

Melinda Stickney-Gibson: Laughing, Growling, and Chirping in Paint
Thomas Masters Gallery
Chicago
November 5 – 29, 2010
www.thomasmastersgallery.com

The Modernist inventions of Abstract Expressionism have gradually faded from the contemporary art mainstream, ever since the ascendency of Pop art, Minimalism and conceptual art in the 1960’s. For nearly half a century Postmodernism, with its subversion of subjectivity and its endless thirst for irony, has become like watching clothes tumbling around in a washing machine. Postmodernism has spun, rewashed and endlessly recycled appropriations of past art, especially neo-Dadaist art, while emphasizing a fascination with technological media. Very little outside of these spectacles has made its way onto the pages of Artforum magazine.

Yet occasionally one can find artists who have somehow kept parts of Abstract Expressionist language alive and invented a vocabulary for themselves from it. Melinda Stickney-Gibson’s works appeal and surprise with a kind of sincerity that does not harden into ironic betrayal. Her brush strokes and painterliness are refreshingly frank and unapologetic in a time when expressionism has not made an appearance since artists like Georg Baselitz and Susan Rothenberg were exhibiting in the 1980’s.

This artistic lexicon that enraptures her work comes from many sources. Sometimes she scribbles a large bundle of lines that twang across the surfaces of her canvases in a seeming homage to the works of Joan Mitchell. There is something inspired by Susan Rothenberg and Philip Guston in the painting Growl which presents an awkwardly scumbled cinder-grey rectangle backed by a threatening patch of red on a white field. There are shades of Cy Twombly in the painting Giggle, with its spontaneous graffiti scrawled into a thick custard of white paint. Then there is a shadow of Franz Klein’s sumi-e ink brushwork in the grand and loopy automatist gesture that skirts the bottom of Gibson’s large painting Dreaming, Listening. The many “weathers” of texture in these fields of off white paint (and bare canvas) are more free and spontaneous than those of Robert Ryman’s minimalist painted “zones.” Yet the centerpiece of Gibson’s purpose remains the expression of mood, not Abstract Expressionism as a “style.”. The groundwork of each painting is rich and multi layered in unpredictable ways. A rusty dirt brown is besieged by a field of clotted white gestures in the painting SSSSSHHH while in My Silences a red grid peeps out from behind a yellow-white fog with a kind of mute austerity. Canvases which evoke darker moods overshadow the white fields in deep, muddy tones, while more lighthearted feelings become playful gestures that dance and glow on the sea of white paint. Gibson’s layers of paint add up to a diary of feelings that settle on some engagement or battle within the field of white. Each stakes out its unique emotional instincts with unpredictability in an abstract shorthand of her own invention.

Gibson’s titles also occasionally allude to differences between male and female consciousness – as with the title of her large painting For The Girls. Sexual tension vibrates in the painting Boy Story where the eggshell white surface is almost completely covered in a curtain of four angular red brushstrokes that seem to signal both seductive power and danger. There is a distinct whimsy in many of the painting titles which are as poetic and surprising as the brushwork. There is laughter lurking behind a giant brown cloud of woven brushstrokes humorously titled The Crashing Maybes. Gibson also understands how to create space not only through value and color differences, but also through the subtle play of texture. The painting Falling Down masterfully plays shiny surfaces off of flat, and heavily painted areas against thin. There is a richness to these textures that cannot be photographed and which gives an uncanny physical satisfaction in the presence of the work.

Rothko, Guston, Klein, Rothenberg, Mitchell and Twombly are all artists whose work offers traditions which were meant to be built on – and build from these Gibson certainly does well, fusing influence into unique subjective invention. Barnett Newman had once commented that here was never really such a thing as an Abstract Expressionist “style” and the art writer E.C. Goossen had once said the movement might well have been called “Abstract Individualism”⁽¹⁾- a description which fits Melinda Stickney-Gibson’s work very well. It is a good time to reconsider the tradition of abstraction which Kandinsky had instigated – how improvisation is directed by “inner necessity” – a practice which Gibson keeps alive and well through the many surprising poetic moods of her painted surfaces.

Footnotes:
1. E.C. Goossen, “Rothko: The Omnibus Image,” Art News, January 1961, p. 38

Diane Thodos is and artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. She will be exhibiting at the Kouros Gallery in New York City in 2011 and is represented by the Paule Friedman & Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, the Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago.

Growl, 45″ x 49″, Oil on Canvas

Falling Down, 45″ x 49″. Oil on Canvas

Giggle, 26″ x 24″. Oil on Canvas

My Silences, 45″ x 49″, Oil on Canvas

SSSSSHHH, 45″ x 49″, Oil on Canvas

Top image: Dreaming, Listening, 73″ x 91″, Oil on Canvas

It was a bold statement when the Chicago art scene needed one. After a downturn in the economy and The Fire, Chicago’s art scene seemed to have lost the luster it had in the 1980s. It was said during the high point of that decade that the number of galleries in SuHu was only second to that in Manhattan.

However, by the early ’90s the Chicago art scene was a shadow of its former self. Some notable temporary art shows, put on by artists like the Cold House group, proved there was still an artistic spirit in Chicago that was still hungry, even if the art world couldn’t sustain it. World Tattoo was the embodiment of that spirit. Since the nomad galleries were fleeting, the work may not have been shown in the best light. World Tattoo was different. It was a strong, solid permanent exhibition space that took a stand on the corner of 13th and Wabash. Arms folded and with the sneer of a bouncer at a biker bar, it said “Fuck you!” to those that would write off the Chicago art scene. “There is good work being made here and you need to take a look!”

It eventually closed down and the space was taken over briefly by another exhibition space, Izzo’s Artery, before it was inevitably swallowed up by the condo revolution, as the South Loop became a place to eat and sleep. Fitzpatrick moved on to focus on his work, yet continued his leadership in the Chicago art scene. This time, though in a more mentor-like role, with his Firecat Press and by example.

Fast forward 17 years and the Chicago art scene again finds itself in need of a kick in the ass and Fitzpatrick is once again happy to oblige. Last night I saw the opening at Firecat Projects, a new space dedicated to showing new work in a more dignified manner than we’ve seen in recent months. Run by Tony and his business partner, Stan Klein, it occupies his former studio, as the artist now works at home. The inaugural show is the first solo show of his work here in two years. To some this may seem kind of self-serving, but he can do this because it’s his, damn it (and he’s the Fuckin’ Mayor)! And what better way to stir shit up? The show kicks ass.

Firecat Projects steps in at just the right time. The Chicago art scene has been sort of languishing since the heady blogosphere days of the mid-oughts. It is a time when stupid little contests (Loop Open, I’m looking your way) and filling abandoned store fronts with art are supposed to get us excited about the Chicago art scene again—however, these efforts fail to stir the hearts of anyone. Firecat Projects proves that there is still a bold spirit in Chicago that will not rest.

Beatriz E. Ledesma: Not Quite There Yet
Elephant Room Gallery
Chicago
June 13 – July 22, 2010

There is a richness and sense of place to the exhibition of Beatrice E. Ledesma “Not Quite There Yet”, currently at the Elephant Room Gallery. There’s a theme the artist establishes and celebrates which reaches for explanation while connecting the traffic of conception to development to completion. In this show, she has found ways to do such things in a fashion is both pleasing and, upon exploration, tenacious to the unexpected. There is range in her works.

“I decided to show Beatriz Ledesma’s work because she is an artist that is incredibly passionate about her beliefs and concerns with current society specifically in the U.S., but also around the world,” shared Kimberly Atwood, curator and gallery owner. “Her work is directly influenced by these beliefs and reflects quite obviously in all of her vibrant pieces.” She concludes, “I am also intrigued by her background in psychoanalysis and how she interweaves that into her art, resulting in a marriage of the two that makes sense to both viewers coming from either background.”

A sophisticated use of browns and yellow ochre presents an emphatic sense to, “Surrounded by Warmth”, oil on canvas. There is a depth in this use of color, as well as a subtlety. In one bottom corner Ledesma surrounds a small brown bird on a swath of red and green patch. There are touches of the primitive along side resolute strokes and pale wide-openness accomplished with brushwork. “I tend to cover the canvas with a yellow ocher or raw umber to strip it away with a cloth and then apply it again- as many times as the energy indicates,” says Ledema. “This process allows me to determine if there will be a source of light and where it will come from. There are times when there is no image but only the treatment process of the canvas. I trust that the image will come when it is time.”

There is poetry in the work, some of which smiles of a different time, and with the artist’s application, and her tints and tones of. The shapes and angles of her shades and figures supply a shyness, or strength of. A lipse of sort. It is as though a pre-verbal society has come alive. The artists shares, “Oils and watercolors were the media I worked with when at the Institute de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires, so I trained on them. But as time has passed I have chosen to continue working with oils as they have a personality of its own- if I dip the brush into a tinny amount of pigment, it will colored more than I want to.” She continued, “There is warmth, they take time to dry, and I can go back many times as I want to work and rework an area; besides the layering process brings a depth to the image that I find highly attractive and visually pleasing to the eye.”

In her willowy,”2010″, oil on canvas, as in her, “From the Earth, to the Earth, Breathing”, the viewer is called to look and move deeper into the canvas. These pieces push and pull with their evolutions of shades of reds and yellow ocher. There is polish to this performance, with the artist’s layered, scratched canvas groans from the scraping and brush work.

The works of Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Kathy Kollwitz, and the prints of William Blake in particular, have been very appealing and moving for the artist. They contribute to the dramatic expressiveness of as her figures, and appear distilled into her color. Ledesma notes, “When at the art institute of Buenos Aires, we were trained to look at the European masters; I felt particularly drawn to Flemish art for the use of oil in details and the light it seems to emanate from its paintings. The use of light & darkness, emotion and drama energy in these works also reflects this.”

This exhibition confirms the artist’s now confident engagement with color. Yet she does on occasion wrestle with her art. “I may ‘sacrifice it’, she jokes. “I actually fight with it- scream and insult at it or it may call for a complete slash of gesso upon the image worked The piece has to talk to me and if it does it after ‘our’ fight”.

In the narrative of her work, the artist makes a leap toward turning her philosophy into art. Absent are the abstract themes some strive to peddle as representative, or to separate the figure from the painting in its imagery. What one finds ultimately is graceful and pleasing in its rhythms, imperfections and all, hardly not quite there yet.

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