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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.

Renata Palubinskas

Child of the pure unclouded brow
And dreaming eyes of wonder!
Though time be fleet, and I and thou
Are half a life asunder,
Thy loving smile will surely hail
The love-gift of a fairy-tale.

Through the Looking-Glass,
--Lewis Carroll

In a very serious sense, the paintings of Renata Palubinskas are Fairy-Tales... but as J.R.R.Tolkien observed in his 1964 essay, "On Fairy-Stories" in Tree and Leaf: "Faerie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted."

And C.S.Lewis, in Tolkien and the Critics (Notre Dame: 1968), added that this Faerie and myth "applies the treatment not only to bread or apple, but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly."

Those comments are an apt introduction to the paintings of Renata Palubinskas. Byron Roche Gallery is on the mark in cautioning that "Palubinskas' images have been described as surrealistic; however, she is not concerned with embracing a particular artistic movement for its own sake." And no fine artist really is.

It is an intelligently organized showing. One of the first oils by Palubinskas to greet the viewer is "Crowning of Innocence" (1997). It brought to mind Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and that impression grew with each consecutive oil painting. "Crowning of Innocence" builds upon the template of traditional Christian emblemata -- angelic forms, bestowing a crown from above, flank the glowing young girl who is the central focus. The artist did state that she was exceptionally taken by the daughter of an acquaintance: her model radiates a very particular, wise innocence. Palubinskas' discovery is akin to what C.S.Lewis termed "the rich significance which has been hidden by 'the veil of familiarity.'" Her paintings often seem like unfamiliar actors vaguely remembered in a previously unheeded drama.

She is an artist who strives to see more clearly by refocusing through an allegoric 'looking-glass' -- she intuits in artistic creation. Her visual vocabulary, while neither programatic nor rationally ennumerative is, however, accessible. The work simply does not explicate or analyze itself for the viewer. The poet, W.H.Auden, said "the fairy tale is a dramatic projection in symbolic images of the life of the psyche, and it can travel from one country to another, one culture to another culture, whatever it has to say holds good for human nature in both, despite their differences." (Tales of Grimm and Andersen, Modern Library: 1952). Renata Palubinskas is a native of Kaunas, Lithuania, but Auden's gloss certainly applies to the oil paintings on display here in Chicago. And yet no commentary captures the delight of these paintings: images with the depth of multiple glazes, a vivid but balanced palette, and a command of light, shadow and form.

Palubinskas studied art and art conservation in Kaunas, Lithuania, and her familiarity with Old Master's painting techniques is a salutary influence. In her style and technique, she manages a presentation which reconstructs a historical provenance, a patina of tradition, but which unites it with every day objects and fantastical beings. It may be that the seeming patina captures the sense observed by Auden: "What seems a story stretched out in time takes place in fact at every instant...."

"Twins" evokes an air of 'yesterday,' but whether its time is that of the Brothers Grimm, or the seventeenth century is impossible to decide. Both young boys seem to study the viewer, oblivious to the discreet detail and furtitive preoccupations about them. One senses that, much like we the viewers, they have only a familiar and complacent awareness of their world. The small mouse in the lower right is only coincidently interested in an overturned, and perhaps abandoned cup, out of which coins slip. Their situation is a mirror to our familiar reality.

In "Rising of a New Man" rats surround the title character, but seem more like supplicants eager for new subsidies, than hostile or voracious predators. They may well have been inspired by the nomenklatura of the old Socialist past, but Palubinskas' gentle stylization manages to endow the vermin with 'a straight face.' They stand before us, iconographic and outside of any time or land. The viewer is forced to make a personal judgement. That same style adds to the distancing that prepares the viewer to accept the a-reality of her subject images. The central character, almost more jack-in-the-box or toy than person, wears a glassy cone-cap filled with dill pickles. If that is the object of the rats' veneration, then their hope appears to be receding, and just as the stiff joy of the 'New Man' greets a somber landscape.

"Desecration" (1999) is exemplary; and a particularly arresting piece. At center left a chimera -- bird-winged, animal and man -- urinates, -- whizzes-- onto what strongly recalls the Tree of Life so central to centuries of Christian emblemata. Popular legend has it that hedgehogs use their back spines as a larder, for storing and carrying food. In "Desecration" the hedgehog retreats from beneath the tree, a captured apple on its back, and offers rebellious protest. The composition allows at least two distinct readings: either the desecration is malice toward the benefit the tree affords the hedgehog, or the hedgehog, with a parting hiss, bears away a token rescued in the course of the act. The work offers a universal, a primal impulse, but 'universal' does not imply an absence of ambiguity. Palubinskas herself, in an April 1, 1999 article of the Grosse Point News, stated "I want to show how unstable and multilayered this dualistic world is."

"Desecration" plays with insight and delight upon shared and traditional imagery: the desecrator resonnates with chords from medieval carvings and illuminations, Hieronymous Bosch, perhaps even TV commercials. It takes remembrances from folklore and old wives' tales and gives them rebirth through the overtones of the philosophic and the psycholgical. Renata Palubinskas noted at the opening for this show that she believes "Desecration" will be the first in a series of related oil paintings.

"Seventh Trumpet" (1998) is the painting Byron Roche Gallery used for the announcement card of this exhibition, and it is the most clearly readable in its theme, and explicit in its stylization. But much of Renata Palubinskas' work is far more complex and rewarding. Her paintings stimulate, provoke and delight. They are not, as might at first seem, any kin to Surrealism, but very much in the spirit, a serious spirit, at the very core which animates much of fairy-tales and the true insight of which we hide in the back of the mind: they form our subliminal allegories, and inquiries of perception.

And much of the artist's themes rest in what J.R.R.Tolkien noted: "The magic of Faerie is not an end in itself, its virtue is in its operations: among these are the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires. One of these desires is to survey the depths of space and time. Another is... to hold communion with other living things."

In her art, one turns to see in strong, visual relief, for better or worse, what animates the world and how. And the artist accomplishes this with a certain innocence, which even when it recognizes evil, remains resistant and aloof. As the Byron Roche Gallery notes: "Palubinskas' attempts to capture the fragile nature of reality result in unsettling images where beauty is haunted by fear and emptiness, but hope also resides in desolation."

This exhibition offers realities behind the world's mundane facade. The paintings of co-exhibitor, Scott Bullock, are reviewed as Part Two of this review.

And the exhibition may be viewed 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.