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Also this issue:

Reflections
Beth Lipman uses glass to recreate and redefine artwork of the past.
-Robin Rice

High School Reunion
-Jim Weaver

Bill T. Jones
-Deni Kasrel

Sounds Like Progress
-Juliet Fletcher

My Lord, What a Morning
-David Anthony Fox

April 11-17, 2002

art

New Worlds

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Bryan Hunt: Protean Nature -- Paintings & Airships Neysa Grassi: New Paintings Through April 13 (some works will remain on view), Locks Gallery, 600 Washington Sq. South, 215-628-1000(Left) Neysa Grassi, Both Worlds (2002), 59 x 55 inches, oil on canvas; Bryan Hunt,

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Two shows at Locks Gallery offer a map of two artists’ visions.

by Susan Hagen and Robin Rice

Bryan Hunt: Protean Nature -- Paintings and Airships

In his fourth show at Locks Gallery, New York artist Bryan Hunt has installed eight paintings and four sculptures, made in the past two years, inspired by his longtime interests in landscapes, rockets and engineering. Like his past work (waterfalls, lakes, The Great Wall of China or the Hoover Dam, for example), the pieces are artfully clipped-out or underlined passages from technology and man-made gestures in the landscape. Here, topographical maps provide an a priori two-dimensional structure for Hunt’s new paintings, while formal structures of rockets and aircraft give shape to his sculptures.

$\"<i$ Bright Angel #2 (detail, 2001), 132 x 48 inches, ink with oil paint on canvas.\" width=\"180\" border=\"0\" height=\"484\" />

Bright Angel #2 (detail, 2001), 132 x 48 inches, ink with oil paint on canvas.

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ARCHIVES . Articles

Also this issue:

Reflections
Beth Lipman uses glass to recreate and redefine artwork of the past.
-Robin Rice

High School Reunion
-Jim Weaver

Bill T. Jones
-Deni Kasrel

Sounds Like Progress
-Juliet Fletcher

My Lord, What a Morning
-David Anthony Fox

April 11-17, 2002

art

New Worlds

Bryan Hunt: Protean Nature -- Paintings & Airships

Neysa Grassi: New Paintings

Through April 13 (some works will remain on view),

Locks Gallery, 600 Washington Sq. South,

215-628-1000(Left) Neysa Grassi, <i>Both Worlds</i>

(2002), 59 x 55 inches, oil on canvas; Bryan Hunt,

Two shows at Locks Gallery offer a map of two artists’ visions.

by Susan Hagen and Robin Rice

Bryan Hunt: Protean Nature -- Paintings and Airships

<i>Bright Angel #2</i> (detail, 2001), 132 x 48 inches,

ink with oil paint on canvas.

Bright Angel #2 (detail, 2001), 132 x 48 inches, ink with oil paint on canvas.

In the 11-foot and vertically oriented Phantom Creek, Hunt has painted over a topographic map of the Grand Canyon. The undulations of the landscape are emphasized by thick brushstrokes of rich and colorful translucent oil colors -- ochre, Naples yellow, black and turquoise -- while the pale blue-green topographic lines show through here and there. He uses a similar large format and nearly identical palette in North Rim Light, but with the proportions of the colors shifted to give a darker, more ominous effect. Hunt's paintings encourage us to ponder the erosion, decay and entropy of the centuries, while at the same time celebrating the landscape and our futile attempts to decipher it.

Hunt's sculptures, on the other hand, seem like celestial vehicles for the spirit or, perhaps, secular icons aimed at the heavens. A high wall-mounted sculpture, Drifter (10 by 55 by 83 inches), is made of two halves of a long, thin seed-pod shape, pivoted at a 45-degree angle to each other like an open pair of scissors. The boatlike bottom half is painted a piebald yellow and silver leaf, and its rounded belly hangs down while its flat top supports the satiny black piece above it. Axis is a 16-foot vertical sculpture that shoots straight out of the earth. The top is a half-pod shape that is painted silver, and it overlaps with a translucent yellow half-pod shape that reveals an elaborate supportive grid structure. This middle section rests, point to point, on a short rounded cone base, made of gray cast stone. Another, more human scale (a little less than 6 feet), vertical sculpture, titled Purple Vert (2001), has a plum-colored translucent boat-form rising vertically out of an irregular cast-iron base.

In both of the parallel bodies of work displayed in "Protean Nature -- Paintings & Airships," Hunt manages to gracefully subvert the forces of entropy and gravity -- and levitate the spirit.

Neysa Grassi: New Paintings

As I circled Neysa Grassi’s solo show in the downstairs gallery at Locks, I was teased by a half-memory of a very different but similar-looking painting. I finally recaptured it later that evening: Jean-François Millet’s 1874 Bird’s-Nesters in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Millet’s picture is illusionistic, a disturbing violent record of peasants clubbing nesting pigeons at night after blinding them with torch light. It’s radically different from Grassi’s mood and abstract content, but notably similar in pictorial strategy.

Like her earlier work, Grassi's recent paintings are distinctly her own; yet they suggest meaningful links to a surprisingly diverse gallery of influential artists, including Bryan Hunt's map-related paintings just upstairs. Aside from an appealing group of eight opaquely meandering gouaches, all are oils, composed of abraded patterns layered with translucent veils of color.

The one larger work, Both Worlds (59 inches by 55 inches), hints at a horizon. It might be a water-washed black net, floating on green-tinged ivory swells and blurring into a steamy haze of dazzling early-morning sun worthy of J.M.W. Turner. Nevertheless, serrated scratches return the eye to paint rather than illusory space. On the brochure, a quotation from Leonardo da Vinci affirms the sense of light, water and atmosphere that permeates these abstractions: "The air moves like a river and carries the clouds with it, just as running water carries all the things that float upon it."

This body of work isolates Grassi's characteristic impasto-knotted markings in layers of glaze. In contrast to paintings of the 1980s, the creamy dense strokes are more centrifugal. Less grid-bound, they usually occupy only one or two levels in the painting. The margins are darker, richer or, as in Palimpsest, have a rusty patina suggesting that countless layers of grime have been wiped from the core of the painting.

Purest Flame, with its Wagnerian red-gold glow emanating from an impasto rune-like central motif, is among Grassi's most successful works. Another is the adjacent White Heat, a cool burst of fiery squiggles delicately edged with pink, which vaguely suggests the incandescent center of some of William Blake's subjects.

Grassi's love of all-over, semi-graphic patterns will remind viewers of Mark Tobey's "white writing," but Grassi never commits to one "text." Her paintings are transcendent, even mystical, yet the central emanation of light, the agitated, obscured pattern remains visually so similar to Millet's strange brutal picture. Both artists illuminate the compelling beauty of human vision with a power beyond words.




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