“8 Elements” Exhibition

“8 Elements” Exhibition

Van Der Plas Gallery

This event has ended.

A recipe for art is like a poem. A painting can have—should have—eight elements, according to the teaching guides we found online. Could they be line, form, space, shape, texture, value, tone, and color? Or could they be unity, balance, movement, rhythm, focus, contrast, pattern, and proportion? What about depth, timeline, vibration, temperature, speed, viscosity, tension, and grit? Or sweetness, sourness, fragility, fermentation, oxidation, sadness, turpitude, and scent?

It’s a given in our field that viewers don’t grasp the relationship of the elements until they see them together. Here, in this gathering of twenty-two artists, a new kind of crystallization begins. Each works out a different set of his or her own elements until we have hundreds and then thousands of pronouncements set free to run around the room.

Nina Skowronski’s photographs hover on the edge of the shadow realm that separates the everyday from the physical sublime. They’re stark, sculptural images of nudes—one with an eerie ripple on its spine, the other with a rogue reflection on its nose. Ada Krowinkel, an artist from the Netherlands, also chooses women as her subject, but in her “Going Crazy” paintings, the women are rioting in the streets, very much in the manner of early expressionist Ernest Ludwig Kirchner.

Balance seems an important consideration; what about imbalance? Qiurui Du’s disturbing painting, “An Awkward Situation” depicts leering cartoon women who look like Russian dolls. Two are chewing on mystery food items. Someone is brandishing a handful of daisies; someone else, a cat. Even more unsettling are Gail Comes’s stern, mechanistic portrait heads with stern Aztec overtones.

In the middle of this melee, April Hammock’s Beneath Paradise pulsates with small nodules of color that look edible. They play off Ashley Vanore’s knifed-on abstracts in confectionary colors.
From there, we can go to a place between abstraction and figuration, where Élisabeth Gineste’s delicate compositions live. Her paintings contain washes of atmosphere as well as ghostlike faces, as if Paul Klee and R.B. Kitaj got together with a can of spray paint.

Fred Gutzeit, a gallery favorite, is represented here by an ambitious painting of a time machine. The face of a polished steel dial has painted vignettes of chewed-up work gloves and the contents of a casually-lived life: a TV, a bucket, a cabbage, some wiggly stripes, and a banana.
Next to this, Chao Wang’s unapologetically weird landscapes are an equally strong presence. In one of her small paintings, a pair of almond-shaped boats rest on an ice floe. Her large-scale painting depicts a three-legged biomorphic spaceship stalking through a rocky landscape, with blobs and filaments—its nervous system, probably—dancing on the roof.

Grant McGrath’s “Hold it Together,” a drawing of his own hellish imaginary visit to Alphaville, seems to point toward an ethic among artists about memory: it can be revealed and enjoyed without being understood.

Among the other works swept into this collection are Jean-Michel Comte’s startling, antic figures that are at once embracing and impossible to read. Then, Kane Grose’s demonstrates a welcome graphic mastery in his hard-edged “Interaction,” while Leonardo Lanzolla’s primitive, loopy animals, so much like Baziotes’s undersea creatures, cavort on the edge of imagination.

Weaving through this field of imagery are Ludovic Simon’s painted collages, including “Make a Croire,” with its abundant punk overtones. Marie Jose’s mixed-media collages made of rice paper, dried flowers, and ink seem like a gentle rebuke. Tom Cox’s tender and wise painting of a bovine in a pasture, much like a Franz Marc Blaureiter work, draws a viewer into a pensive mood. Perry Khalil’s “Picture of Love (For N)” dispenses with the idea of painting altogether, although it’s a canvas with paint on it, and puts the hanging hardware right on the front. The wire normally used to suspend the painting from the wall connects two small areas of color—a blue springtime sunset, and a quick color study of a minute of sun. Two incorporeal bodies, connected by a sinew.

Whatever your conclusion of what qualities a painting should contain, remember that the 8th element in the periodic table is oxygen.
Come breathe with us and celebrate the atmosphere, knowing that the combined effects of these works will generate more lists, more curiosity, and, as always, more questions than we can answer.

Media

• Painting

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