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"Landscapes": the Midwest, James Winn;
Urban, Enrique Santana; Provence, Didier Nolet
Ann Nathan Gallery Those philosophers, the Phenomenologists, began with the premise that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Our five senses not only interpret the world (and sometimes deceive), but the human creature responds with emotions, associations, covert conclusions. No two individuals truly experience the very same scene. This is true even where some places, whole regions, are known for a distinct character, a 'personality,' with discernable moods. The philosophers could only talk about the experience. Travellers observed it. Artists summon what is, quite literally, their viewpoint. And although each viewer brings his own perceptual luggage to a landscape, an artist, in love with his creation, offers opportunity to see through another's sensorium et persona. "Landscapes," at the Ann Nathan Gallery, currently offers paintings of the Midwest by James Winn; Urban Landscapes by Enrique Santana; and interpretations of Provence by Didier Nolet. Any attempt to pigeonhole "Landscapes" as just 'Realism,' that is, depiction, would be like attempting to weigh out an emotion or calibrate a personality. These are paintings which focus on the artists' experience of place, rather than grandstand the experience of being artists. The content, through the artists' eyes, conveys distinct identities. James Winn
James Winn's eight acrylics on paper masterfully portray the atmospheric temperaments and cyclic states of being of the American Midwest. Try as one might, his landscapes cannot be fit into Eastern seaboard or Western locale, nor anything of Europe. They are current portraits of a prairie which, despite settlement and domestication, nonetheless reasserts a distinct character. Two of the most fundamental features of these landscapes are their horizon and their heavens: a deceptively featureless plain which wears the moods of seasons and which marionettes to the gestures of weather. James Winn's landscapes are rooted, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said of The Great Gatsby, "somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of he republic rolled on under the night."
On the West wall at Ann Nathan Gallery, are five acrylics, "Silver Maples No.2" (16.5" x 40"), "Grain Elevator" (31" x 46.5"), "March Thaw" (10.5" x 46"), "Farm Creek No.8" (18" x 48"), and "Sketch for T" (11.25" x 24"). James Winn has acknowledged his sympathies for John Constable (1776-1837), who is quoted on the gallery card: "It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key-note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment... The sky is the source of light in nature and it governs everything, even the common observations on the weather of every day are altogether suggested by it...." Although Winn adheres to a factual, naturalistic rendering in his work, his choreography of cloud formation, and of rainfall and snow, air and water, build upon some of the contributions of J.M.W.Turner as well. "Grain Elevator" plays upon the nuances of light in cloud; and in this work Winn very adroitly portrays the oblique streams of sunlight from rifts in the cloud masses. It is a difficult 'effect of a moment,' and in lesser hands usually spells disaster. Winn displays high technique and skilled judgement in the several paintings where this effect is captured, but well beyond that, his work elicits, stilled on paper, an ephemeral but ever recurring experience. In Winn's art, each image, even when a variation in series, is a distinct intimate moment and place, and at the same time it is a recurring occurence, an echo to come. The Philosopher, J.H. Van den Berg, once said that "Poets and painters are born phenomenologists." and added "We are continually living a solution of problems that reflection cannot hope to solve." In his Poetics of Space, philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, noted of moments like those which interest Winn: "It would seem, then, that it is through their 'immensity' that these two kinds of space--the space of intimacy and world space--blend. When human solitude deepens, then the two immensities touch and become identical." Bachelard adds: "The coexistence of things in a space to which we add consciousness of our own existence, is a very concrete thing." It is precisely what Winn accomplishes in his art -- a poetics of space. On the East wall are "Downpour" (14" x 26"), "Backyard" (14.5" x 26"),"Over the Banks" (15" x 36"), and "Clouding Over" (18" x 46"). "Over the Banks" is particularly in character with the Midwest ethos. It recalls the experience of recent years with the Kankakee, De Plaines -- a feature of a region typified by flat terrain, high ground water and variable flood plains. And "Clouding Over" again displays the balance and subtle skill of James Winn in treating the effects of streaming light in cloud. What is most noticeable is the degree to which it is the land itself, rather than the human modifications upon it, which account for the specificity of these landscapes. The human constructions and artifacts are much more homogeneous and interchangeable throughout the U.S., but the weather and native, natural topology and flora still identify an unmistakable unity. "Downpour" is equally impressive. Winn has taken what would be the proverbial flatness of the Midwest, and imbued it with a majestic spirituality and drama. Here, a small stand of trees forms a fulcrum which seems to hold again the swirling motion inherent in Winn's arrangement of cloud mass and terrestial furrowing. In the painting's skies, a powerful focus of bright light in the upper left counterpoints a subdued salmon tone of a further cloud thinning to the lower right. The handling of the clouds, and their placement build a natural dynamic, one which is both a natural occurence and an emotional and spiritual phenomenon. The artist further plays the patterns and textures of the ploughed and torn fields under cultivation against the turbulent heavens: the composition and its rendering offer a mirror and yet a further tension between earth and sky. What, in the hands of a lesser artist, might become a flat and prosaic depiction, in Winn's expression seems a spiritual involvement with nature. Phenomenologist, Gaston Bachelard, in discussing art critics on Georges Rouault, quoted that one must "...start from the center, at the very heart of the circle from where the whole thing derives its source and meaning: and here we come back again to that forgotten, outcast word, the soul." The paintings of James Winn are art that nourish and refresh the spirit -- they offer a rapport with the natural and each work consitutes an enduring experience. Winn's landscapes are especially enduring because, as the philosopher, Bachelard, noted: "such an image is not received in the same way every day. Psychically speaking, it is never objective. Other commentaries could renew it. Also, to receive it properly, one should be in the felicitous mood of super-imagination." James Winn was a student at the American Academy in Chicago and Illinois State University, Normal, where he earned his B.S., M.S., and M.F.A. Enrique Santana
Edward Hopper's declaration is even more aptly true for urban environments than it is for nature's phenomena. So many of the works which mark Hopper for the general public are small town or rural landscapes in which people are conspicuously absent; or are confined within Big City interiors. In the former works, he treats transient but eternally reoccurring moments and they constitute a seeming release or reverie. Hopper's urban interiors more often give the impression of a vague unease of containment, of human lives trapped in mundane business or emotional isolation behind closed doors, focused through windows and within four walls. His outdoors exemplify solitude; his urban interiors tend toward loneliness, a very different state. In Hopper's urban milieu is a newly encountered and ambivalent experience for that earlier generation.
Enrique Santana's treatment of urban landscapes shows some of a Hopper-esque approach to the urban outdoors -- but Santana's sensibilities grow from a later urbanization and adaptation. His technique displays a tighter edge; and his urban landscapes focus on a feel for open air and light which reveals an acceptance, a appreciation of the urban environment. Enrique Santana has four oils on canvas in "Landscapes": "Chicago Station" (70" x 50"), "Randolph Street Bridge" (74" x 50"), "LaSalle Street Bridge" (36" x 26"), and "Montrose Beach," a smaller format work. Like Hopper's depopulated small town landscapes, they center in on the human constructions of the city, but Santana captures a positive sense of use, of strength about the locales. His scenes imply an appreciation, an enjoyment of city space and structures. They inhabit not solitude, nor loneliness, but a contemplation and repose more often reserved for nature. Were it not that his subject locales are Chicago, his sensibilities might well be akin to a Hart Crane or Frank O'Hara in paint. "Montrose Beach" portrays a cyclist, framed by columns and approaching the viewer. Here Santana's color and formal composition enters a different sensibility. He has started with what exists, but transforms it in that fresh, unreal light of dawn. The formal frame of vision evokes some of the feel of a Salvador Dali landscape, all the while adhering to the actual. What brings Dali to mind is the manner in which Santana focuses upon and isolates structural geometries -- architectural and incidental -- an approach which has been distinctly crystallizing in his most recent work. In the catalogue to the exhibition, art critic Lisa Stein, noted of "Millennium," (a piece not included in this showing) that the artist "explores the relationship of forms on a rooftop-a pyramidal skylight and a circular sculpture reflected in a rectangular pool." "Montrose Beach first reveals this tendency toward an underlying and fundamental 'geometrisizing.'
The color scheme, again consistent with plausible effects of first dawn, nonetheless approaches some of the erie chromaticism of a Maxfield Parrish. The hydrocarbon/neon tones do indeed occur in nature, but only an artist with courage and control over his art can dare to realize them in oils so believably. The 16-page exhibition catalogue illustrates some of Santana's new paintings, which are not on display in this showing. The art seems to indicate a growing development toward capturing real images at that junction where the actual takes on surreal overtones. One is remained of Leonardo DaVinci's famous quote about staring at a mottled wall to discern new and latent images. Santana reveals an eye for the familiar seen through unfamiliar eyes: an ever fresh perceptiveness. Some of his paintings, such as "Millenium" (1999) and "860 Lake Shore Drive" (1999), at first strike the viewer as surrealist fantasy landscape, and then immediately allow the eye to resolve the image back to the real actuality. This is an impressive approach. In it, Santana draws upon the same principles which underly the famous "Rueben's Vase," wherein perception jumps between the image of a vase, and the image of two heads, face-to-face, in profile. Santana's formatting and composition is subtle and shifting, but it would be naive to regard it as 'super-realism,' or the like. His art manages to deal fully with life and nature's phenomena, and yet on a level which is oblique and richly productive. His paintings increasingly explore a new experience of urban reality. And what is best in his work eludes capture in description or comment. As critic, Ernst Gombrich, once pointed out: "Images are not the equivalent of statements, and to ask in every case what a painting 'means' is no more fruitful than to ask the same of a building, a symphony, or a three-course meal. A painting of a moonlit landscape does not 'mean' a moonlit landscape, it represents one." Both James Winn and Enrique Santana offer the gallery-going public excellent paintings. They are artists whose careers will be well worth following in the future. They are well worth making a special trip to Ann Nathan Gallery. Didier Nolet
The colors and contours of Provence have tempted many to loosen the hold of orthodox naturalism. Didier Nolet was born in Paris and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but the sun and lay of the land in Provence has drawn the artist toward a touch of graphic idealization and muralistic fantasy.
Nolet's art is represented in this showing by "Looking North" (60.5" x 84") and "Refuge" (70" x 97"), plus two smaller oils on canvas. Nolet's work brings to mind Van Gogh's observation; nature under a brighter sky, a Provence sky, does seem to encourage a more decorative expression. One feels that in these works there is a greater involvement with the processes of painting, rather than a commitment to the responses and contents of the initial subject matter. Technique and medium are the bare bones and blood of painting: but it is the personality and commitment of the artist which determines the behavior and vitality of the body of art which emerges. There is a feeling that, here, the artist is not as fully invested in the work, that the act of painting has gained the advantage. The landscapes are pleasant, and liveable. It may be however that the landscapes are too close to a visual actuality, without exploiting that, and yet do not incorporate a fuller expansion toward the fantastical. They are competent, but it will be of interest to see where the artist will be led by his art in future years. "Landscapes" will continue at Ann Nathan Gallery until August 28th, 1999. It is one of a number of exhibitions held in conjunction with Absolut Vision Chicago 4. The 16-page catalogue for "Landscapes" is ten dollars. It includes an informative introductory essay by art critic, Lisa Stein, and several excellent reproductions of works by all three artists. --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. |
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