Art Review Archives:

	V. 9 thru 10 chronological (current)
	V. 7 thru 8 chronological
	V. 5 thru 6 chronological
	V. 3 thru 4 chronological
	V. 1 thru 2 chronological
	Alphabetical Index V. 1 thru 4
	Hotlist Current 2008
	Hotlist Archive 2008
	Book Reviews

Renata Palubinskas:
New Paintings

January 12 - February 16, 2001
Tues-Sat: 11 AM-6 PM

Byron Roche Gallery
750 North Franklin, Suite 105
Chicago, Illinois 60610
Telephone: 312/ 654-0144
http://www.byronroche.com

Significant artists stand out; and yet they are a product of their age. And each age is both an on-going present, and a product of its past. Historian Barbara Tuchman noted in A Distant Mirror (Viking: 1978) correspondences between the 'calamitous 14th century' and our own, even more afflicted age: the epoch of revolutions, two world wars -- of ideologies with armies. And in such times, what lingers from the past is often wisest counselor to the present: a counterweight, a renewing alternative, a second start.

Lithuanians were in the Baltic area by 2500 B.C.. In the 14th century, Lithuania decisively accepted Roman Catholicism. The history of recent centuries has been one of domination, occupation, and decimation. In 1940, the land was annexed by the Soviet Union, which by state policy, was militantly atheist and materialist. A Baltic nation, and its living past, were suppressed by an extreme modernity. Renata Palubinskas was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1968.

"Renata Palubinskas: New Paintings" is currently on view at Byron Roche Gallery, Chicago, in a showing which continues until February 16, 2001. It offers an artist who has rethought a historical iconography, perceptively, freshly, to address the modern world. To be enduring, and perpetually new -- that is the dream of alchemists and of the best of art. It is a presence in the eight paintings on display.

Earlier works of Palubinskas have revealed a clear, crisp idiom in brushwork, and a subtle nuancing of color. Her use of glazing, an interplay of translucent layers of thinned paint, accounts for the depth and luminosity which characterize her paintings. In content, her previous work was more detailed in imagery, suggestively allegorical -- intensely conceived. And her themes were often more timely and immediate: a personal response to societal concerns.

Palubinskas's newest work seems a shift in sensibilities, from society and psychology, and toward contemplation of wider moral and spiritual engagements. Often, one senses a vacillation, a tension between engagement with her themes, and a self-awareness of the historic, ritual formalism which has accrued as their vocabulary. The gallery's statement for this show cites three themes: "man's eternal struggle to avoid choices that represent immediate gratification but eventual harm; ...the haunting of life experiences with latent possibilities for death; ...attempts to comprehend the natural world, and the serenity and ecstasy that follow understanding." These works represent not so much a change in the artist's concerns, as they reach toward a broader focus, communal and shared through history, upon earlier perceptions.

What Palubinskas draws from historic Christian iconography informs expression as well as content. One confronts a reduced, schematic composition and a purposeful positing of figures and visual elements; salient disparities of scale in those compositional elements -- a measure arising from their significance, rather than natural proportions. Here, transcendent hues and content are to be regarded, read, as well as experienced. At times a subtext, if esoteric in intent, is nonetheless immediate and direct in effect.

Taming of Evil (2000) exemplifies many traits of these new works. The scenic stylization is regularized, geometrically idealized: clouds array themselves in quilted pattern; mountainous peaks are strongly conical; decisive contour and color distinction predominate over meticulous texturing. The whole is an unseemly visual program akin to Hans Memling or Pierro della Francesca. There is the obvious, but unrevealing hagiographic light streaming from the heavens. But -- daemon and angel -- both faces are identical. The evil being tamed... is an alter ego.

In Death Chasing Time, the skeletal rider chases a hart, which traditionally has more often been a symbol of brave innocence, and even Christ. Here, medieval motif, enigmatically turned, centers in medieval landscape... or what may well be a historical Lithuanian locale. And a historical precis.

Among these eight paintings, there are two triptychs. The Green Hills series, suggests a strong, if mute narrative unity. In Green Hills I, the young girl appears expectant, a petitioner; while in Green Hills II, she regards a small flower in a gesture of new discovery. In both works, a nimbus or heavenly circle hovers among the clouds. In much traditional Christian iconography, such a nimbus enframes a image of God's blessing hand, or God and angels in entourage. In Palubinskas's newest paintings, the revealing portal... is reticent: empty. At the opening, visitors debated whether this impressed them as the anticipation of an unseen presence; or as an unexplained, and perhaps ironic absence... by which naivete is betrayed. In these canvases, the artist increases attention to the lone figures by foiling an ornate pattern in their clothing against a sedate modeling of the landscape. Regularly distributed plants, small and single, only faintly echo that pattern, but this does add to a visual harmony. Here, there is a natural order. Palubinskas's third canvas reveals only Death, lingering beneath what one presumes is the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (which appears in the artist's other triptych, Adam and Eve).

What is striking about these paintings is the air of decorum they present -- a North European spirituality questioning its resolve. If at times that evokes a pre-Raphaelite sensibility, Palubinskas's approach even more recalls a Hugo van der Goes or Rogier van der Weyden (late 1400s). Her art seems a parallel to past precedents: The "Nazarenes" of the early 1800s who re-examined Albrecht Durer, Perugino and the young Raphael; their heirs, The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the mid-1800s, who sought to renew earlier iconographies. Much of the sensibility Palubinskas herself reinterprets for the contemporary viewer seems striking and refreshing, precisely because it is today rare.

Every generation makes the discovery that its divine vigor has been dissipated, and each sense and faculty misapplied and debauched. ... The eyes were not made for such groveling uses as they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible.

Henry Thoreau, A Week on the Concord
and Merrimack Rivers (1849)

Renata Palubinskas is also a conservator who has worked on Old Masters' paintings. A parallel with the Pre-Raphaelites is not extreme. Her second triptych, Adam and Eve does recall, in subject and approach, the age of Durer. In this series -- with Adam at left, Eve at right -- the central, larger panel displays the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. That it is a static, even decorative image -- and the most central in meaning -- underscores the subtle gestures of represented humanity. Viewers at the opening searched closely for clues to the couples' attitude. The work, however, is laconic and withholds overt commentary. It is a strength in this art. And it is tenuous to suspect further intent in what may well be introspection. The artist's choices for her art are sound; and there is admirable skill in treating them.

Central and Northern Europe in recent decades have generated much significant and serious art. Their situation after the last World War had made them a crucible in which community and national identity, faith and doctrine, has struggled with a modernist, militant and hostile ideology. Art there, often bound with national and religious identities, ever so more maintained and further evolved its serious intents and powerful effects. In that region of the world, the serious issues of our modern age have been played out in blood; and art, no matter how apolitical or aesthetic, does arise in a present, as well as from a past. It remains an act of human concerns. This artist was nurtured by a milieu where art has been vital, significant; where it truly counts. The painting of Renata Palubinskas is a significant gift to contemporary art.

Renata Palubinskas arrived in the U.S. in 1993, and now lives in Grosse Point Park, Michigan. Her "New Paintings" will be at Byron Roche Gallery, Chicago, until February 16, 2001.

--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.

Editorial Note: Books mentioned in www.artscope.net reviews may be ordered through this site's Barnes & Noble link. Of interest are Barbara W. Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (Viking: 1978). "Renata Palubinskas: Paintings" appeared earlier in www.artscope.net (July 1999). A review of "New Paintings" by Fred Camper also appears in The Chicago Reader (Feb. 2, 2001).