(the show will continue its residence at Bistineau during several events planned by Kristi Dorothinia Hanna, aka Dorothy Allen, of Visual Sound & Movement and the Arodasi dancers, in March)
The title of this show, “Carnival,” could not be more appropriate. Just in time for Mardi Gras, Bistineau Gallery has provided us a collection of art from some of the more interesting and original artists you will find in Louisiana, (or anywhere else for that matter). Before I discuss the art in the show, I have a confession to make. As much as I love the visual arts, there are several reasons why I almost never write art show essays. The first is that most of my friends know I usually wait until the last minute to do things and they already have enough problems without having to worry about whether or not an essay is going to be ready in time (if at all). The second reason is a little more complicated. I am one of those people who have strong opinions about what constitutes good art. I like certain things much more than others, which is a polite way of saying that I am an art snob. Add to that the understanding that artists have a hard enough time as it is and should never be ridiculed or ignored, but encouraged whenever possible, and you can see the problem. If you are writing an essay for an art show, what nice things can you say about the art that you don’t like? Do you just ignore it, or do you go into excruciating detail about all the reasons that it stinks? That is the main reason I agreed to do this essay. Not one of the artists in this show stinks. In fact, they are all really good. Rather than try to weave them together thematically, I would rather discuss them one at a time, the way you would move from one show or ride to the next at the State Fair. And since I have freely admitted that I am an art snob, I hope you won’t mind if I drop names from time to time in discussing the artists and their work. A few years ago, I wouldn’t have put art historical and art critical references in an essay like this. To do so would have been rude and self-aggrandizing. But these days, with Google around, you can reference almost anything you like without alienating your readers. If someone sees something new or otherwise unrecognizable, they can just Google it. That way a reader can decide in a matter of minutes if an author is full of it or not.
I met Bill Gingles years ago and the thing I most liked about his art was that he made pictures from materials that were closest to my heart. Not only oil and acrylic paint, but clay, wax, auto-body glazing putty (i.e., Bondo), pine needles, leaves and anything else he felt like using. In one instance, he had packed all sorts of these painterly materials into a frame and left it under his house to age for a few months. The result was not a mess, but a wonderful painting--as refined in its color as a work by William Baziotes, as bold in its composition as one by Anselm Kiefer. In short, it was great!
Bill still makes images from composite materials and his textures and colors remain subtle and nuanced. The abstract expressionist gesture also remains: the splash, the drip and the swoosh. In recent years he has introduced language--letters, numbers and dates--as well as simple foregrounded geometric shapes and female nudes reminiscent of David Salle’s early work. In other words, he has gone postmodern. But where Salle’s representation of women is sardonic and even misogynistic, Bill Gingles embraces the female nude. What used to be flowers, branches and leaves in earlier paintings have converged with the female figure to create images that bring to mind peacocks’ tails, fleurs-de-lis and the idea of woman as nature: fertile, regenerative, voluptuous, beautiful. I also need to mention the bowls, painted in the tradition of modernist still lifes (Cezanne perhaps), empty for the most part, but sometimes assembled into hemispheres and even spheres. The spheres are described by great circles, something a mathematician would immediately recognize as belonging to the non-Euclidean geometry of Bernhard Riemann, a nineteenth century branch of mathematics that provided a foundation for Einstein’s general relativity and all of modern physics. This is the same information that informed Picasso’s Analytic and Synthetic Cubism early in the twentieth century. (I know this is a lot of stuff to discuss, but this is exactly the sort of thing that makes Bill’s work so interesting to me. It’s just fascinating, don’t you think?) Before you run screaming out of the room let me add that even with all of these things going on in his paintings, his work is very easy to look at.
Allison Dickson is one of the best young artists I know. Having said that, I’m not sure how to describe her art in visual terms, since each new piece is different from the one before. As an artist she does drawing, painting, assemblage, sculpture, video, installation, . . . you get the picture. I could say that when you first enter the room, her work has a habit of walking right up to you with it’s arms open wide, refusing to let you pass until you’ve at least said “Hello.” One thing that her work is not, is shy. One thing that it absolutely is, is original. Ali uses everything around her as material for her art: her life’s experiences, (her friends’ lives’ experiences), and every piece of wood, wire, paper, book, picture, furniture, in fact any piece of cultural detritus that captures her interest, regardless of how or where she finds it. Ali is the kind of artist who would go dumpster diving for the sake of her art. I have done it myself, so I say this with the greatest respect.
A lot of Ali Dickson’s work is done with oil and mixed media on wood. For the most part, the images in her art are of and about women and continue a tradition that sees the body as an independent source of identity and self-expression. In times as complex and difficult as these, what else is there to trust if not your own body? Why shouldn’t the body be the foundation upon which you construct yourself? Ali places the lens of her art directly in front of you and stands on the other side of it, completely unashamed, allowing you to stare at her as long as you like as hard as you like. Even so, there is something enigmatic in the way she surrounds her painted, sculpted and cast images of women with painted wood and framed constructions or boxes that resemble, to me, tiny little movie or theatre sets. It would be easy to compare these adjoining “rooms” to Joseph Cornell’s picture-boxes, but they’re nothing like that. They are more like the backgrounds and scenery from a film by the Brothers Quay--a backdrop for a dream, or a memory of something that never quite happened, dusky if not dark, completely illogical, and at the same time without an ounce of malice or fear.
In short, she’s got integrity and talent.
Robert Trudeau is another artist I have known for a long time, primarily through his performance pieces and his music. I have also seen a number of his pen and ink drawings, portraits all, several of which are in this show. There are two ways to look at an artist who just picks up a pen and goes for it, especially when it turns out well. You can assume that the artist has many and varied interests (being eclectic is great if you can handle the stress) and that the ubiquity of pen and paper makes it easy for the artist to create art whenever and wherever he wants. Or you can think of the act of drawing with a pen as a type of Sumi-e or Japanese painting, and that the drawing, quickly as it may be executed, is the result of long contemplation. Knowing Robert as I do, I’m going to say that his work is a combination of the two, that it is something he can do anywhere and anytime he likes and that it is also something that provides him with a point of intersection for interests as varied as music, Southern “primitive” art, and various types of “underground” art that include comics, tattoo, graffiti, sticker art and street fashion. Moreover, his drawings reflect a serious interest in the psychology of diversity: of race, gender, class and culture. Pretty heavy for someone working with a ballpoint pen.
Robert’s portraits tend to be either full-frontal or profile. Although he uses a variety of pointillist and cross-hatching techniques, each portrait essentially takes the form of a contour drawing that divides the drawing space into distinct sections that he can treat independently. This provides him with the opportunity to mix and match textures, shadings, and patterns in an almost limitless number of combinations. He tends to use an allover technique that keeps your eye moving from one part of the picture to the next. Many of his subjects look Cajun and are beautifully featured, with almond-shaped “cat’s” eyes and lips pressed together into quiet smiles. Even though he draws them with wit and humor, he never makes fun of them. It is easy to tell that he likes his subjects. They seem pretty cool to me, like people you might meet at a Mardi Gras parade. I would hang out with them.
When I look at Mark Charleville’s images, I cannot help but feel his sympathy for the things he paints, his deep respect for them, their present and their past. He understands that the world echoes repeatedly in us, and that, once inside, it seldom finds its way back out through the same doors and down the same corridors it entered in. It is these echoes that form the basis of his paintings. He reminds us that the lines and images that a painter makes can show things as being close or far apart, connected or separate. For his part, Mark has chosen to show them all as being inextricably joined together.
The concept of the shaman is evident. The person who, through gifts of age or wisdom, is able to talk not only to animals, but to the five elements--earth, metal, water, wood and fire. The person who understands, in the deepest spiritual sense, the virtue of silence. That is what I like most about these paintings: that the conversations are civil. In one case a guitar, a hummingbird, flowers and the summer heat all share in the discussion. In another painting, the shaman is completely silent, drawn through the air by the whispering water and tree. In Mark’s work, both in subject and in style a type of magical realism, all things are possible. This leads me to believe that the painter and his shaman are also joined together, for they have each chosen a path that leads to the same simple and profound truth. To see, you first have to look.
All in all, this is a very good group of artists. We’re fortunate to have them. I hope they eventually find their way into museum shows and collections, national reviews and everything else an artist is supposed to want. The fact that they are gathered together at Bistineau Gallery says nothing but good about the quality of the art and artists in this part of Louisiana.
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