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Also this issue: Black Power Players Munakata Shiko Turning Point Send in the Clowns REV Revival |
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July 25-31, 2002
art
 Charles Burwell, Untitled (2001), 54 inches by 52 inches, oil on canvas. |
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PURE: EIGHT PHILADELPHIA PAINTERSThrough Aug. 16, Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art, 615 N. Broad St., 215-627-6747
Exploring a conceptual link between abstract art and spirituality, a small show at the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art brings together recent work by some of Philadelphia’s finest abstract painters.
The museum's curator, Matthew F. Singer, organized the show along with painter Bruce Pollock, after they discovered that they were both intrigued by a connection between abstract art and the Second Commandment's ban on "graven images." Jewish visual traditions have been involved with abstraction from ancient times up to the mid-20th century (think of Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko or Morris Louis), and this in turn has influenced a broad range of contemporary artists who continue to work with abstraction. Perhaps in our time abstract art is becoming an expressive, nondenominational language that can serve a function of unifying the spirit through purity of color, form and pattern.
Just as the abstract patterns of the ornate Byzantine-inspired interior of the adjacent sanctuary offer visual stimulus for meditation, many of the abstract paintings in the show draw the viewer into a meditation on their formal elements and, in particular, patterns. The complex paintings of Charles Burwell are made up of different systems of patterns, composed of rich colors and textures, coming seamlessly together like collaged scraps of beautiful fabric. In Untitled (54 by 52 inches), Burwell has built up multiple layers of thin stripes of color, like corduroy, red and gray oblong shapes overlapping black and brown stripes patterned with rose-colored squiggles. Neysa Grassi's melancholic oil on canvas painting, Untitled (48 by 46 inches), has a textured surface of ochre and brown, made of swirling curlicue brushstrokes. Over this uniform ground, Grassi created a pattern of soft drifting forms by painting dark-red spots (like small injuries) in the deepest hollows.
In the ebullient Multiple Exposures #17 and #23, both about 4 feet square, Steven Baris emphasizes the negative space around a pattern of circular shapes with bright, opaque colors, grass green or saturated cerulean. Meanwhile, the pale and scrubbed-out colors inside the circles seem to recede indistinctly into the distance, like cats-eye marbles with little universes inside them. Two paintings, each 31 by 24 inches, from Alice Oh's series, Phases of Conception, have a similar motif of lively spherical patterns. Jubilant and precise, they both have zippy bands, clusters and spirals of spheres, painted white, blue-green, orange and yellow, that appear to be moving over a pastel background with horizontal and vertical stripes.
A few of the artists make paintings that are more tangibly physical, suggesting icons or devotional objects. Barry Goldberg uses oil and encaustic on linen in Invert Awning (72 by 52 inches) to give a particular waxy translucence to the simple shapes and colors he works with. The shapes, rounded rectangles, are painted in pure, floating colors -- brown, lemon yellow and orange -- and appear "object-like" on a large periwinkle-blue field.
Of all the artists in the show Marc Salz has most directly drawn from his heritage, and says that his recent work, consisting of a thick central Baltic birch panel with several smaller panels attached, "resembles a page of the Talmud, in which a primary text is accompanied by commentaries." In Water, Water (for Paul Celan) (21 by 22 inches), Salz has covered the panels with simple painted motifs, including eye shapes and S-curves in shades of blue, brown and pink.
Some paintings in the show are designed to suggest imaginary physical structures, as well as metaphysics. Bruce Pollock's two paintings are both based on elaborate hexagonal grids that interlock and go through subtle shifts in scale and color. Net of Indra (19 by 18 inches) has a top layer of peach-colored lines that shifts to mauve around the edges; lower layers are shifting hues of tan and gray. The effect is dense and visceral, like skin and bones, but filled with light and space. Anne Seidman's paintings are studied and carefully composed, yet spontaneous in their impact, suggesting a lot of energy coming to rest in an interlocking structure for a brief moment. Untitled (22 by 22 inches) is a zesty patchwork of colors, yellow, green, brown and orange, all modified with streaks, wiggles and drips. Seidman makes a funny reference to the figurative in Untitled (12 by 12 inches) by surrounding a long, very thick flesh-colored brushstroke with blocks of pinkish green, mustard yellow and lime green.
Unlike most exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art, only one out of the eight artists included in "Pure" currently practices the Jewish faith -- something that visitors reportedly have noticed and are pondering. But the idea behind the show is extremely compelling and the work itself is excellent. Surely this broader view of the issues, offered by Singer and Pollock, has given us a few things to think about and, hopefully, a more generous and expansive perspective on the origins and spiritual function of abstract art.
