Magic Number

Robin Rice on Visual Art: "RSVP" at LGTripp Gallery

by Robin Rice

Back in 2007 when Luella Tripp learned that Siano, her last gallery, had to close because the Siano design group was giving up its lease, she immediately began planning an eponymous new space.

LGTripp Gallery is worth the wait. Airy with a vaulted ceiling and large arched windows, it is home to a stable of 14 respected area artists; however, right now the gallery is hosting an invitational summer show (hence the title "RSVP"). The number 14 must have some magic for Tripp — that's how many non-gallery artists she asked to participate in this show.

Painting dominates, but some of the most interesting work in "RSVP" isn't painting. Victoria Pepe describes Infinity Journey Through Infinity as a "virtual video painting." Available only in CD form, it contains programming that causes a picture (in a video or projected format) to continually change colors within a pattern of shapes outlined in black and accompanied by Pep's quiet, chiming analog and digital music. The specifically selected, ever-changing colors in Infinity Journey are not pixilated but, rather, programmed to be the same hue at any size. The combinations are random but, as Pepe says, "not haphazard" and will rarely repeat. The picture itself consists of many quirky geometric shapes ordered around a fat horizontal lightning-bolt shape that unifies the composition. It's as if the center has magnetically pulled all the other shapes to itself and locked them in place. Infinity Journey is easy to appreciate, even companionable. Pepe sees it as potentially meditative.

As a CD it may be perceived as less unique than, say, a print, but it is a limited edition (the artist does not say how many she will make). It would be especially effective if presented in a darkened room — a truly artful night light.

Tripp loves abstraction, seductive surfaces and smoothly resolved compositions. John McDaniel's semi-symmetrical wall-mounted relief assemblages are composed of sheets of steel painted or patterned with grids of cut-out dots and looping wire lines; the layers play with light and shadows. David Meyer's Jump Frog of synthetic fabric on painted wood utilizes a similarly patterned material to fabricate what might be a suggestion of enlarged Ben-Day dots and floating light and shade.

Circles, clearly a theme in this show, also play a role in Tom Hlas' painting Calling Forth (pictured, p. 22). This is the familiar vocabulary of painterly abstract expressionism in which scale ranges from delicate sgraffito and graffiti-like signs to fat, drippy circles.

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LinLing Lu presents three severe, eye-popping circular paintings, while in Juri Kim's Broken Conversation series, tiny black circles partly fill holes leaving a field of small, unpredictable white crescents, reminiscent of composition book covers. Stan Smokler's welded steel sculpture also gets in on the circle game with its orbiting metal spheres.

Elsewhere, Maria Napoli's vertical oils superimpose a few electric brushstrokes on softly composed ground in more muted colors. Tripp has a long-term interest in abstract photography, as well; an example in this show is Norman Sarachek's abstract Icarus works, which he describes as "cameraless chemigrams." The process records mysterious shapes of twigs and leaves in a baroque expanse suffused with rosy celestial light. Annette Cords' diamond-shaped Andora offers a more emphatic, uncompromisingly crimson heaven sparkling with hard-edged stars.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)