'Simple Statements'

February 17 - 24, 2000

[Art Reviews]

Basic beauty

URI keeps it Simple

by Bill Rodriguez
SIMPLE STATEMENTS. Paintings by Pat Adams, Lavi Daniel, Max Gimblett, and Jason Stewart, and sculpture by Phoebe Adams, Peter Soriano, and Oona Stern. At the University of Rhode Island's Main Gallery, Kingston, through March 5.

"The Book of Squares," by Max Gimblett

If simple is as simple does, then Simple Statements is doing us a useful service. The current exhibition at the University of Rhode Island's Main Gallery is using a geographically and conceptually diverse collection of seven painters and sculptors to remind us how pure and unfettered by trends art can be, here at the nexus of two millennia.
There is a danger in an exhibit painting with such a broad brush, if you will, in trying to make such a disparate grouping say something coherent. But while the artists represented may not have signed the same manifesto, they are all interesting to hear from. Seeing the URI show is like wandering around a cocktail party and finding every conversation engaging.
Even whimsical. With "Polyester Points of Contact, Version II" (1998) Peter Soriano gives a kind of implied life to a mechanical structure, using merely color and physics. The contraption has four large pads, painted forest green with sky blue bottoms, that are braced on the floor and leaning on a wall as though straining to support it or push it over. Nearby, Phoebe Adams's "Providing Passages" (1996) is a visual pun: a canoe-shaped wooden vessel contains a carving evocative of a clitoral bud. In a corner, Oona Stern has played with perspective, painting a few roughly stylized floor boards on the concrete and up the wall ("Untitled [Floor]").
A similar observation to Stern's, about dimensionality, is made by Lavi Daniel. From a distance, "Urge" (1997) and an untitled companion done the same year appear to have angular forms bulging from behind the canvas, casting conflicting shadows. Upon closer examination, the paintings seem both less complex than that and more so. The surfaces are flat, but the cloud-like fields are rich with mottled texture, matte hues of ochre and yellow over a thin gloss applied to plywood rather than canvas.
Texture also enriches simple forms in three recent works by Pat Adams. Geometric shapes hover Rothko-like on striated fields, forms given depth and character by mica or crushed shell. In "Over, Over," an oval crowds a square up into a corner, tiny striations on the bits of shell making the forms as organic as tidal line sand.
Lush textures inform simple shapes in much of this collection, nowhere more than in Adams's 13-foot-long "Therefore" (1995-99), which dominates one wall. It merges geometry with action painting, uniting two warring modes of making art. The Apollonian meets the Dionysian in the form of semi-circles and speed lines, like sound waves captured on canvas.
My favorites in the show are the calm and dignified works of New Zealander Max Gimblett. The Minimalist movement of the late 1960s celebrated the visual by abstaining from the gestural, the painterly, in sedate reaction to the flaring nostrils of Abstract Expressionism. Gimblett's corner of the gallery creates a similar quiet harbor while making very clear that these pieces are hand-made, proffered. "The Book of Squares" (1999) is a diptych. On the left, a gilded square ennobles its companion, a white square. The latter is edged with three broad strokes from a Japanese ink brush, its right side open toward Gimblett's other pieces. The closest is a small gilded globe titled "Goldfish," floating on the wall like its namesake does in water. The last is another in the calligraphic sumi-e style, and is composed simply of a circle created in one pure stroke, like the gesture that the 13th-century Florentine Giotto made to prove his painterly prowess in a legendary competition.
In the brochure for the show, its curator, gallery director Judith Tolnick, refers to the exhibition as "examining the basic image structures in painting and sculpture at the millennium." How many ways artists in America have permission to bring us back to our visual roots. Rest assured, Simple Statements seems to say, in another thousand years artists and their audiences will still be seeing the same things.
Speaking of timelessness, the Corridor Gallery exhibit outside the Main Gallery could very well share the same title as the main show. It is called Microcosms, and the prints and drawings by Lilla Samson are inspired by organic forms. From mountain streams splashing over stones to microscopic plant and animal life, the works are visually captivating as well as technically skillful, with little interest in being visually literal. It's a worthy complement to the adjacent offering. (Microcosms is on exhibit through February 21.)

Basic beauty

URI keeps it Simple

by Bill Rodriguez