Gillian Wainwright’s “Watching the Stars” is part of the “First Impressions” exhibition at ART150 Gallery in Jersey City.
Old organizations are usually dominated by established players. That is as true in the arts as it is in business or politics.
Pro Arts is, by the standards of New Jersey arts advocacy groups, pretty old: It has been around for more than three decades, and it counts among its 200 members some of the most innovative, accomplished and celebrated painters, sculptors and photographers in the Garden State.
Isabelle Duverger’s “Love Egg.”
While Pro Arts has never expanded aggressively, the roster adds new names every year. This keeps things fresh, and helps infuse an operation dominated by lifers with creative energy. “First Impressions,” a group show at the narrow but friendly ART150 Gallery in the Powerhouse Arts District in Jersey City, focuses on the latest sorcerers to join the cabal.
New members they are, but kids they aren’t. The 13 participants in “First Impressions” include several who have been refining a personal vision for a long time, even if they haven’t shown all that often. They have been summoned to the Arts District by Nanette Reynolds Beachner, a Jersey City artist with a background in theater, an eye for drama, and a taste for provocation.
Reynolds Beachner is a regular presence in Pro Arts and ART150 and, through her pieces, she has made her feelings about gun violence, environmental degradation and reproductive rights manifest. She privileges message and meaning over the demands of the marketplace. Those priorities make her the prototypical Pro Arts (and maybe Jersey arts) curator.
The “First Impressions” artists have similar missions. Tatyana Kazakova, for instance, often paints from a place of pain and tragedy — and even as her work is emotionally legible, there is always a private dimension to it that eludes an easy embrace. In “Sculpted Elegy,” a large multimedia piece, an image of blue-gray sphere hovers mid-frame. It could be a desolate planet, or the pistil of a dark bloom acting as an antenna for entropic energy. Everything in the image seems to be pulling away from the center, like petals of a flower caught in a cosmic wind.
Reynolds Beachner places this work in dialogue with “Journey of the Holiness,” a painting by the young Tehran-born artist Rene Saheb. Like “Elegy,” Saheb’s painting is an unsettling fusion of the organic and the fantastic. Human figures, black and wraithlike, are rooted to the ground, but over their heads, the sky explodes into rings and mounds of rich color. A tribunal of unsmiling faces hovers in the cloud, too; they could be obstacles, or guides, or judges, or all those things at once.
Paul Federico’s “Plenty of Time.”
Some neighboring pieces are less ambiguous. The agitated “Plenty of Time” registers painter Paul Federico’s dismay at the noise and incoherence of Internet discourse: On rectangles roughly the size and dimensions of cellphones, he gives us too-close faces and dispassionate soldiers, flag fragments and the residue of protest, drum kits and sailboat races and at least one glowering alien with an inverted pentagram where his forehead should be. It’s all flat, chatty and impossible to synthesize at a glance, just like a social media feed. He has scribbled words into the panel, too, many of which suggest that his endless scrolling has given him a brutal case of insomnia. Anybody with an operational Internet connection is likely to sympathize.
Even pieces that seem superficially comforting contain barbs. At first glance, Gillian Wainwright’s “Watching the Stars” (see above) looks idyllic: the painting depicts an urban garden in full bloom on a sunny day, with an alley between brownstones dotted with flowerbeds and tickled by shadows of branches. Yet things are a little out of control. The grass flows toward the viewer in a torrent of yellow-green, and the brown patch of earth by the garden wall is scored by vigorous zigzagged brushstrokes. The ground feels untamed — like something that might swell up and douse the viewer’s shoes. And behind the trunk of a shade tree, a faceless, muscular man peers out at us. He’s up to his knees in vegetation, and the crown of his head is surrounded by leaves. It’s easy to miss him, but once you see him, it is hard to turn your attention elsewhere. He may be the gardener or something similarly innocuous, leaning forward, fascinated by the blooms in the foreground. But he may be up to something more complicated.
The turbulence of Wainwright’s painting — that slight unease that makes “Watching the Stars” something more than merely a pretty picture — feels characteristic of Pro Arts. The members of this group are serious about the pursuit of beauty, but beauty isn’t all they’re after.
Ian King’s “Mass of Neck II (Blue, Nothing).”
Ian King’s “Mass of Neck II (Blue, Nothing)” is, at a glance, a striking, attractive composition: a portrait in paint on watercolor paper of a person in blues and greens with half of his head and most of his limbs excluded from the frame. King, like Federico, has been moved to inscribe words on his own balanced image. Some are written directly atop a swollen protrusion just above the subject’s clavicle. They speak of the terrible uncertainty that afflicts everyone with cancer, and the looming fear of recurrence that accompanies even the sunniest prognosis. To underscore his themes, he has tucked torn-up correspondence from the Robert Wood Johnson medical center into the edges of the picture.
Once the motivation for making the piece is plain, the choices made by King (even the pretty ones) feel like an extension of his terror. The blue lips of the person depicted represent fear — and maybe even oxygen deprivation. The hundreds of dots on the subject’s chest speak of the permeability of the body and its ability to receive and broadcast pain. King uses color and texture not merely to generate visual interest, but also to denaturalize the things he is showing us.
A not-dissimilar illusion is at work in Sean Burns’ gently otherworldly photographs, and even more so in Cynthia Egle-Grant’s “Industrial Stacks of Kearny,” a pencil sketch of the power station beneath the black girders of The Pulaski Skyway with smokestacks stretching upward into a smeared lavender sky.
Then there is the protean talent Isabelle Duverger, whose grabby work has been lighting up Garden State galleries lately. Duverger’s drawings, watercolors and acrylic paintings are distinguished by their clarity and avoidance of the extraneous, even as they are often downright peculiar. The artist likes to subtract everything from her pieces that doesn’t support the main idea or visual phenomenon she is relying on.
“Love Egg” (see above), her piece in “First Impressions,” is part of a series of ink drawings of faceless human beings, almost certainly female, whose bodies are composed of black and white spots in long parallel lines. By varying the rhythm and size of the spots, Duverger is able to suggest contour, suppleness and sexuality. Yet they also feel alien, possessive of integrity and economy of form that eludes mere humans. She encases her two dotted figures in a cracked shell that appears ready to burst.
They carry the future with them. And the future, it seems, is every bit as strange as the past.
Pro Arts will present “First Impressions” at The ART150 Gallery in Jersey City through Feb. 2. Visit proartsjerseycity.org.
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