“Stillness of Life Bauer” Exhibition

Forum Gallery

This event has ended.

Forum Gallery presents the exhibition, Stillness of Life, comprising of recent works by four artists whose disparate subjects and media contrast with their related devotion to probing contemplation of all they examine. Celebrated for their meticulous execution, each artist on view evokes the infinite complexity of his subject, in that space of observation and memory where time stands still.

Robert Bauer (b. 1942) creates sensitive and introspective portraits of relatives and close friends. The intimate paintings on panel and paper, whose detail and scale belie their commanding presence, are completely compelling albeit never confrontational. The subjects look away as we look at them and similarly, Bauer’s landscapes drift off the edges of the frame, evoking memories and infiltrating our thoughts without resolution. Robert Bauer lives and works in Thomaston, Maine; five recent portraits and four landscape paintings on paper are exhibited for the first time together in this exhibition.

Montreal artist Paul Fenniak (b. 1965) creates complex narrative oil paintings, that result from autobiography, dreams, historical references and implications for contemporary life. Of Paul Fenniak’s paintings, Donald Kuspit writes, “The best realism is not just about careful observation and descriptive nuance – in which Fenniak excels – but about discovery and insight. The best realism is not simply descriptive however meticulous the description, but reflective – reflective on reality – and Fenniak’s works are profoundly reflective.” Paul Fenniak’s paintings are like views of dreams where improbable actions are frozen in space for endless examination. Four recent paintings are seen in the exhibition.

G. Daniel Massad (b. 1946), working in rural Pennsylvania and only in pastel on paper, creates still lifes of objects of personal and historic significance, immobilized by light against dark background. His imagination, which he calls “slow pace”, works its way into our thoughts through Massad’s reverent portrayals. Viewing the works is akin to archeological discovery, like the resurrection of the Roman Forum from the dirt beneath unsuspecting feet. Time stops as stories old and new are told through the choice of object and the encrypted messages from the Artist.

Cleveland-based Anthony Mitri (b. 1951) recalls a quote from Wordsworth, “poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility.” Mitri, working in tonally rich charcoal in grisaille, notes that the weeks and months it takes him to complete a single composition becomes an “extended moment of memory […] that seeks to communicate an emotion once felt, as so recollected in tranquility.” Mitri seeks to create “an atmosphere of contemplative quiet, of stillness via settings where the viewer may experience, in a personal way, a quiet moment to reflect on life.” The five drawing in the exhibition are urban or rural places where the Artist has focused his attention, and ours, on the silence and stillness of place and time each location represents for him.