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Curtis Bartone:
Byron Roche Gallery "Curtis Bartone: Paradise, Once Given", showing at Byron Roche Gallery through February 15, 2003, is a cornucopia of pleasures artistic and skillful, botanical and natural. Not least among them are those most simple: the delight of identifying birds, animals, fruit and flowers, exquisitely and accurately rendered; the artist's uncanny command of his media in re-creating forms and textures, from the matted mane of a warthog to the fragile gills in a mushroom's interior. And yet, there is more. Drawing on conventions of natural history illustration, Bartone pairs the familiar forms with man-made elements in a graceful balance that invites musing on the manufactured among the natural, the hand of man among the fruits of Eden. Beautifully drawn, subtle with sense, these eleven works in graphite, etching and silverpoint are well worth seeing. "Earth" -- #1 from Elements series (graphite on paper:40"x60":2002) evokes the satisfactions of ordering the richness of the natural world, of classifying that which we see. Bartone's composition of objects engages immediately, in its velvety array of textures and curious collection of elements, warthog and pineapple, lizard and lily. Ripe fruits, firm perfect vegetables, nuts and seeds, velvety-capped mushrooms and other edibles fan out across the foreground, flawlessly arranged, some of them gathered in small vessels: a celebration of natural bounty. In the background, meadowlands rife with birdlife stretch beneath an overcast afternoon sky, reaching far into wilderness at the left, and at right, banked by an industrial plant, a city of flues pouring smoke onto the wind. In this art the more time one spends in seeing, the more there is to be seen. Each step closer reveals another level of Bartone's amazing, precise, minute detail: in "Earth", the field mouse with his grain of corn, the highly individual treatment of the nuts mounded on the lower left, the tiny heron visible in the grassy distance. Done entirely in graphite, a soft carbon pencil, the subtraction of color focuses perception on the lavish, sensual textures and shapes. It lends as well a sense of a single moment fixed forever in time. "Earth" offers a celebration of the senses as well as a juxtaposition of nature and industry that yields no easy answers. It is tempting to demonize the distant factory, to see the meadowland or the flora and fauna in the foreground as items lost to industry. But Bartone's industrial plant, despite its acres of sprawl and spuming vents, seems distant, relatively benign, even an item of grace in itself; and industry has not been nearly as invasive to the wildlands depicted as has the home-building boom: "Earth" is bucolic compared to today's reality, where single-family housing has metastasized across many such rural landscapes.
"Water" -- #2 from Elements series (graphite on paper:40"x60":2002) composes itself around a shore and maritime theme. On the left a heron, its long-legged stance echoed by the spindled trunk of a fruit-bearing sapling, balances the compact form of a pelican, preening high on a piling to the right. The alligator stretched across the sand between them anchors with its inert weight an effervescent arc of shore-running sandpipers. In and around these, an abundance of melons, tomatoes, lilies and callas are composed in neat arrangements, and populated with small fauna: a lizard, a speckled crab, a cluster of barnacles. The lake behind the sandpipers leads the eye back to a horizon on which rests the faintest rendering of a palazzo. As a whole it evokes a harmony, a certain balance or complement of patterns existing in the natural world; human presence seems distant, nearly absent. But... is it? Both "Earth" and "Water" draw, in part, on the conventions of natural history museums, on the duality of their dioramas, intended to represent reality, but unable to escape evidence of human manipulation. Museology, Richard Ross's photographic study of museum dioramas calls such arrangements "tableaux... intended to fool us within the context of an agreed-upon fiction." And indeed, with only a little musing, the hand of man can be seen all over the place: not only in the obvious presence of human commerce, housed by steel sheds and burning with chemical fire in "Earth", or the pilings and palazzo in "Water", but in the placement of the objects themselves. Only human agency could have arranged these items so neatly, section the fruits so perfectly, or mound the tomatoes in a colander. What seems to be nature, is nature... and yet, is not. In both "Earth" and "Water" Bartone explores levels of duality more complex than they initially seem. It is a dialogue which invites repeated viewing. The works in "Paradise, Once Given" draw the viewer into a world in which we seem to see more intensely than before. To lavish such attention on these things presents them as remarkable, a sharing of enthusiasm that is successful here. Bartone's level of precision, in capturing detail as well as the characteristic 'gestures' of each element whether butterfly, bird, or tigerlily, communicates a deep and serious observation, coupled with sincere joy in rendering. In Invasive Species (graphite on paper:20"x16":2002) Bartone knows his birds intimately, cedar waxwing, starling, grosbeak, blackbird, finch and sparrow: he knows their forms and movements, knows just how to depict their individual feather-patterns and postures. This jazz riff of small birds crowds close on zigzagged branches, whose diagonals and coiled stem-ends bring energy to the work. The sense of rude vigor rises also in the wild hairiness of coneflower and goldenrod that thrust tall stems upward toward the sky. The birds' proximity and bright, beady-eyed personalities suggest an arrested garrulousness, and in relating it to the urban-industrial skyline spread in the low distance, one seems to find them asking: just who is the 'invasive species' here? Vista (graphite on paper:20"x16":2002) posits visual puzzles, mobile composition, genetic conundrums and reciprocity of formal and wild, all seeming "curioser and curioser" the more one observes. In the background the Persian-carpet patterns of a formal hedge garden angle into the distance, set off by a high, indistinct brush fence from a tangled wilderness of trees. In a seemingly unrelated foreground, two hoatzin (crested South American birds that are a relic of prehistory, an evolutionary link unto themselves) are framed by four cultivated blooms, rose, lily and daffodil, rise high on twined stems. But there's a trick here: on the left, the thorny stem belongs to the lily, not the rose; on the right, the rose's stem bears an improbable barber-pole spiral of dark and light. The duality noted above finds many modes of expression in Bartone's work -- nature and industry, the far and the near -- and here, a reflection on wild and cultivated, alluded to in the formal garden within the wild clearing, and the hoatzins, an evolutionary relic, paired with the fantastic cultivation of Bartone's lily-with-thorns or rose-with-striped-stem. With its beguiling patterns and contrasts, Vista keeps the eye moving, cycling, exploring, finding -- a visual pleasure.
Where the graphite works are velvety-rich, lush with texture, Bartone's three silverpoint pieces in this showing show a dryer and more delicate illustrative style, with no diminishment in skill. Offering (silverpoint on paper:20"x16":2002) presents a heraldic construction of parrots, fluid vines, and a Celtically ornate finger-ring. The basic forms intrigue from a distance, drawing the viewer inward into its delicate detail: not just the petite posy of raspberry and blossom by the leftmost parrot, but a herd of alert deer at the bottom, one or two moving along as if just perceiving the viewer, and rendered so exquisitely it seems a breath could puff them away. Offering combines elements of eighteenth and nineteenth century natural history illustration -- delicacy, accuracy, the profile of the parrots, the accurate depictions of the blooms and vines -- with a modern, almost photographically sensitive depiction of the deer to form a vision of appealing grace. Nowhere in nature do we see heraldically twined vines through a finger-ring, surmounted by parrots, but the imaginative construction has meaning: an offering of nature, or to nature, or simply an awareness of its moments of regal, fragile beauty. Mine (silverpoint on masonite:20"x16":2002), a further silverpoint work, unites six raptors in a web of zeal, their aggressive poses brimming with energy and drama. The osprey clutches a fish, the peregrine falcon has seized a small bird, another raptor grasps a frog. The hawk in lower right, wings banked, talons outstretched, is ambitious enough to stoop on the cattle who, tiny by a trick of scale against equally tiny mountains, seem in danger from his scimitared grasp. Here the title echoes the harshness of the hawk's cry, the possessiveness -- 'Mine!' -- and the fineness of the drawing utensil is used to superb effect in the raptors, who are rendered with delicate, intense fierceness. Framing the hawk-filled sky is a traditional Audubon-style illustration: a pair of seed-eating birds, possibly long-tailed flycatchers, are observed perching on a fig branch profuse with lop-eared leaves and pendent fruit. 'Prey' derives from a Latin root meaning 'to seize:' an animal taken by a predator as food. Yet 'prey' has also connotations of helplessness, the inability to resist attack. The seed-eaters are safe on their branch, but the hunting birds rule the sky. Mine is both splendid natural illustration, and allegory of human experience: the defenselessness of everyman, the possessiveness of the aggressor. Two earlier print works share sinuous forms and a fanciful delight in arranging small objects of beauty. In Cherry Rose Broach (sic) (etching:7"x5":1997) the angular facets of metal and gem contrast the soft lushness of the rose petals and the delicate, intricately-patterned fragility of the wings of two butterflies, spread flat as in preserved display. The upward lift of roses and butterflies is balanced by four ripe cherries, glossy and taut, whose hanging weight lends a harmonious gravity. It seems a language we can almost grasp, an allegory of love anchored by sense. Daffodil Broach (etching:5"x7":1997) is a superb balancing act: the heavy ruffled daffodil heads against the earrings, the wedge-winged butterfly against the finger-ring, the coiling vines against the gemmed links of the necklace, all their disparate forms and textures playing off one another with a light, skillful touch. The use of the finger-ring as focal point in these earlier works anticipates the similar theme in Offering, and in all three pieces the man-made and the natural are melded into a satisfying harmony of movement and stillness. "Curtis Bartone: Paradise, Once Given" proffers the flora and fauna of an Eden juxtaposed with visions of the man-made, with a note at times cautionary, at times whimsical. Bartone's technical skill and precise depictions themselves are pleasures; and, delightfully, there is much more to this art than that. Some allegory moves beneath the surface of these works. That it gently eludes, invites rumination and musing, makes this art something to return to again and again. These eleven works will be at Byron Roche Gallery January 10 - February 15, 2003 and are well worth a special trip. The web site for Byron Roche Gallery, http://www.byronroche.com, also features the artist's works. --Katherine Rook Lieber Katherine Rook Lieber has edited ArtScope.net's Visual and Performing Arts reviews since 1998. Ms. Lieber is Editor and Associate Producer for ArtScope.net. Editorial Note: Books mentioned in www.artscope.net reviews are often in print and may be purchased through this site's Amazon.com link. Museology by Richard Ross was published by Aperture Foundation, Inc. in 1989. |
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