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Scott Bullock / Paintings
Renata Palubinskas/ Paintings
July 16 - August 21, 1999

Byron Roche Gallery
750 North Franklin Street, Suite 105
Chicago, Illinois 60610
Telephone: 312/ 654-0144
http://www.enteract.com/~griffin/byr.html

A Sense of Wonder... a Delving Curiosity...

These are among the primal attributes that fashion the human psyche. The Byron Roche Gallery offers viewers a two-fold opportunity to renew both qualities in a well-chosen selection of paintings by Renata Palubinskas and Scott Bullock, showing until August 21st. It is a refreshing experience.

Scott Bullock

"An idea is a beginning point and no more. If you contemplate it, it becomes something else. ... The important thing is to create. Nothing else matters; creation is all."
--Pablo Picasso
(Picasso, An Intimate Portrait, Prentice-Hall: 1948)

For Scott Bullock each painting is not object of art, but a final discovery: the culmination of a intensive and uncertain process of exploration and experimentation. It is his perceptions and associations which he explores and upon which he experiments within the creative process.

Bullock seems no closer to the 'orthodox' streams of Surrealism than Palubinskas. The Surrealists flirted with Freud: Palubinskas' art will probably seem congenial to the Jungians: and Scott Bullock's engaging and finely realized paintings seem to draw more from neurobiology and the social engineers of perception. But all these links are deceptive. Bullock begins with an idea, an impulse, a spur toward a mind field. The visions that result reach out and lead us through our own inner workings. We walk into a Scott Bullock painting, only to get ambushed in our own back alleys of the mind.

In this showing at Byron Roche Gallery, Scott Bullock is represented by several watercolors as well as etching, acrylic and oil media. "64 seconds" (1998), a 60" x 40" watercolor was chosen for the exhibition announcement and it quite representative of his displayed works.

The artist himself concedes the complexity of his composition. He notes that each work is the result of numerous preliminary sketches, which lead to tonal studies for deciding the lights and shadows of a finished work. It is in the course of this process that associations emerge and insights into the nature of a final painting really crystalize. The artist noted that it is important not to become committed too early to a concrete and inflexible conception. Scott Bullock's approach echoes much of what Picasso said of creativity in art. His art is very individual.

And thus, when the artist jokes that, needing a necessary title, his choice of "64 seconds" represented the time it took to arrive at that label, it seems likely. And laudable. It is the art, his process in achieving it, which is paramount. Cataloguers and textbook critics can (and do) come up with their own labels.

"64 seconds," then, first strikes one with lively color and a dramatic overall play of strong light and deep shadow. As in many of his paintings, Bullock's nebulous backgrounds set an often turbulent emotional mood. He plays this off against the meticulous composition and frequently mechanistic coherence of his torsos.

The paintings in this exhibition are a continuation of his "Contours" series, and in "64 seconds" the fragments which build into the human form are explicitly arranged in contours or discreet zones. I demur from the gallery statement: I do not "recognize the individual parts before the whole assembled form becomes apparent to the eye." Rather, the torso is the initial and striking impression: the parts resolve into specifics after this.

It is difficult to decide if there is metaphor or analogy in the artist's choice of components -- but there is a rationality of afterthought and second guessing. Artists such as M.C.Escher and Roger Penrose (physicist) were centrally concerned with the viewer's visual reception, the mechanics of mind, space, optics. Bullock's composition betrays a greater recourse to language and culture, and as such it frequently reveals how we are conditioned, or even wired, to think of our natural and human state. And often, how we perceive ourselves determines what we incline to become.

In "64 seconds," rather than the proverbial 'chastity belt,' the viewer is presented with a padlocked restraining band on the breasts of the form. This may be a higher aspiration. Significantly, a padlock key is inconspicuously taped inside the circuit-breaker box in the left thigh. And the circuit-breaker appears linked to the light bulb which hangs in the rib cage. The ensemble is thus equipped with that which inhibits and that which releases; and they are instruments of willful choice.

It is not to imply that the artist himself subscribes to any mechanistic reductionism, a la B.F.Skinner or the ilk. But that perspective has crept into our personal landscapes. It is there. The viewer may resist, endorse or debate it, but the artist has unveiled the previously covert presumption.

The abdominal shield sports a star definitely suggestive of a martial origin, and it brings to mind the cod piece, an object of enduring oral tradition. In "64 seconds" the rib cage is concretely a rib cage, but the upper torso graduates into organic wood limbs. If too often our perceptions and even sense of self is indeed conditioned by our metaphors and analogs, Bullock seems to strip away the false mind, and, in his drama of light and color, induces us to grope toward intangibles about it. If the paintings do not make us mindful of soul, they lay bare the clutter we cover it with. Each of the exhibited paintings is an exploration well worth entering upon.

"A Moment Before The Wind" requires further notice. It is among the few which offers a scene of stasis: the legs of the form are modeled by folds of draped cloths: there is anticipation in the posture of the torso. In part, it arose simply from the urge of the artist to create it so; but it forms a preamble and a subtle counterweight to the remaining pieces.

Scott Bullock's paintings at Byron Roche Gallery lay bare some of what animates us and our human, social matrix. And in this exhibition, his curiosity and exploration -- and his expressive, technical abilities -- are a perfection companion to the wonder and life of the psyche, the finely executed subliminal allegories created by Renata Palubinskas. Palubinskas now lives in Gross Point Park, Michigan. Scott Bullock is a graduate of Chicago's American Academy of Art, and studied design at Triton Technical Institute, Charleston, S.C..

This exhibition offers realities behind the world's mundane facade. There is a sense of wonder. Inquisitiveness. The paintings awaken... and renew us.

It is now before us, on canvas at the Byron Roche Gallery, until August 21, 1999. And it may also be viewed on the gallery website: http://www.enteract.com/~griffin/byr.html

--G. Jurek Polanski

Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net.