Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 1, 1990 TAG: 9003300177
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ann Weinstein
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It was selected from New York galleries by Robert Fuller, Dennis Roberts and Chong Yaio-Chen for the 79th Annual Exhibit at the Maier Museum at Randolph-Macon Woman's College, where they are members of the art faculty.
Contrary to the heroic-scale work associated with the avant-garde, all the works are intentionally small and, according to Fuller, "user-friendly." Instead of being overwhelming, their small size permits close and intimate study.
There were no other prerequisites. Paintings, sculptures and ceramics range from modern to postmodern, formal to narrative, crude to polished. Expressionist and geometric forms are combined in one amazing painting: "Chora Savakian Suite No. 5, 1990," by George Green, starts out in froth and ends in the pictorial intelligence of spatial intrigue.
Texturally overwrought brush-strokes, swooping into wave forms, look like candy-colored icing on a cake. But the dynamic order of an illusionistic, three-dimensional geometric structure, thrust from the picture plane, holds them firmly in place. So do squiggles cut across the contradictory forms with the pointed end of the brush.
Among the newest trends are shaped and three-dimensional paintings raised from a flat ground. Russell Sharon shapes his sunken landscape outward toward the frame to define it in literal 3-D.
Actually a model for a large sculpture already installed in a Florida park, a primitive, polychromed crocodile is faux folk. But it sure fooled me. Simulated sincerity is in. It's easy and it's fun. But it may be the most cynical appropriation to date.
More finely crafted, a seascape by Vladimir German surrounds a generalized central image with a broad frame painted with specific mood and light conditions of the sea. Any allusions to other artists are intentional. Gwenn Thomas uses oils to paint both a color photo of a distant ship framed by silhouetted columns of a dark porch and the actual frame shaped like a boat.
Guy Johnson's "Eternal Ascensions, 1983" looks naive - or neo-naive - simply because it looks so art history-wise.
The loaded strokes of paint in an oil on paper by Jack Tworkov look emphatic and improvised. Updating abstract expressionism, recent gems of paintings by Stanley Boxer are small, decorative and outward looking instead of inner directed. Richard Hull's neo-abstract painting is architectural, anatomical, psychological and - given all that - surprisingly friendly. Nell Blaine's still life uses the gestural strokes of abstract expressionism to describe texture, shape, pattern and a sense of well-being.
As a teaching tool, the show includes examples of tromp l'oeil, which is a very old and extreme form of naturalism. Barbara Drewa updates it with personal symbols and modern subject matter. In an ironic twist, Jud Nelson carves the soft forms of a man's freshly ironed and folded shirt in white marble, thereby immortalizing it with the likes of Michelangelo's "Moses."
Noa Attia's constructivist Plexiglas box is painted instead of strung. An example of postmodernism, Livio Saganic's sculpture/container combines clean and irregular forms cut and carved in slate. It alternates between its formal properties and its narrative title: "A Definitive House Must Retain Its Shadows."
The highly polished stainless steel curves in a signature sculpture by Jose de Rivera are fabricated in fluid modernist style. Jerome Kirk cuts curving, clean-edged parts of a female nude from sheet metal and suspends them from a layered frame. They can be swung by hand, and even the most impossible configurations seem plausible.
In a ceramic feminist sculpture by Nancy Carman, a simplified female nude grips the vessel/head of "Goliath." Cast in bronze, "David with Dog" by Boaz Vaadia is stolid, funny, dense and dumb.
Lined up on a curved base and cast in highly polished bronze, the individual objects in Oded Halamy's "Study for a House" are Southern and surreal, with overtones of Giacometti and the Middle East.
George Nick renders the physical time and place in a snowy view with strong shapes, quick strokes and a minimum of handling. Linda Sokolowski's twilight scene of people on a beach has a quotient of narrative mystery. It is intensive, complex and airless drawing. Sonia Gechtoff's dark and simplified moonlit scene is broadly painted, breathless and mysterious.
With objects lined up on a shelf, Robert Kogge's subdued still life derives from Georgio Morandi. With much more surface activity, Daniel Greene's objects on a shelf suggest William Bailey. Maurice Golubov repeats the lively arcs and lines of his miniature still life in a much later painting of fractured geometry. A contemporary of de Kooning's, he may be the oldest emerging artist of them all.
A horizontal landscape by Daniel Chard is so minutely painted it looks like a 19th-century etching, while the petroglyphs in James Brown's stained canvas look as if they were incised in ancient stone.
"Alternate for Raphael, First Toilet Training" by Ralle is a upsetting, sado-mechanistic version of a harmonious 16th-century Madonna and Child. Meticulously painted in the traditional technique of oil on panel, it seems to owe as much to Andres Serrano and the tenor of the times as it does to Raphael. I wonder what Jesse Helms would make of it.
There are no photographs in this show. But the imagery in Arsen Roje's painting, just shy of photo-realism, derives from the mass-media.
I couldn't help thinking as I left the show, what a magnificent teaching instrument the museum is.
The show runs through May 20. The Maier Museum at Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Lynchburg, is open Tuesday through Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m.
by CNB