ARTS . Re-View

National Treasure

Robin Rice on Visual Art


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Published: Mar 20, 2007

Just as Japan designates certain individuals as living national art treasures, Thomas Chimes (85), currently showing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Locks Gallery, which has represented him for over 20 years, should be hailed as a living Philadelphia art treasure. His iconlike panel portraits, an extended series, are treasured by connoisseurs. His personal pantheon includes Guillaume Apollinaire, Antonin Artaud, Oscar Wilde and, above all, Alfred Jarry, who invented the term "Pataphysics" to describe the branch of philosophy that deals with an imaginary realm. In spite of Chimes' love of French art and writing and his inclusion in the 1975 Whitney Biennial and other significant venues, he's chosen to remain in essence and location a Philadelphian.

Earth, oil on panel,
from The Entropy Paintings

Antonin Artaud, Oil on panel,
From Adventures in 'Pataphysics

Chimes' work in its disparate phases is everything contemporary painting can be: engaging in terms of content, original and personal in expression, aesthetically compelling, and not exclusively two-dimensional. His hermetic enmeshment with a personal mythology suggests the compulsions of an outsider artist; indeed, Chimes has been drawn to madness. He is a "painter's painter" who is highly conceptual, literary and narrative. His work manifests resonant links to Warhol, Duchamp and many more.

Early abstractions with bold X's, Matisse-like flower shapes and crucifixions, in black, white, yellow ochre, grass green and red (late 1950s) and riveted metal boxes (l960s) are paradoxically more symbol-laden and literary than the representational panel portraits that follow (1970s). Enclosed in heavy wood and based on photographs, each portrait unsettlingly projects a lively presence imprisoned within the shadowy patina of memory.

Chimes' ethereal recent work enters a limitless domain: lighter, whiter — diaphanous. Portraits, such as the one of James Joyce, are insubstantial yet uncannily exact, secrets overheard in a whispering gallery.

The dome of Memorial Hall floating in mist could be San Marco, but, if you ask Chimes (he's a great raconteur), he'll explain that it's an accurate transcription of a view he saw often as a boy. He is also exploring a return to cartoonish and cipherlike imagery related to Jarry's drawings. Fifty of these small panels are on view at Locks Gallery. Not too shabby for a half-century of painting.

Thomas Chimes: Adventures in 'Pataphysics

Through May 6,Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th and Ben Franklin Parkway, 215-763-8100.

Thomas Chimes: The Entropy Paintings

Through April 14,Locks Gallery, 600 Washington Square South, 215-629-1000.