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Vanessa Clarke: Paintings And Sculpture
Ongoing Exhibition

New Content Gallery
3012 North Lincoln Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60657
Telephone: 773/528-8467

Finding a gold doubloon among beach shells is always a joy. New Content Furniture Gallery currently offers just such an opportunity. Amid the gallery's selection of designer furnishings, some of European excellence and some that are highly individual, there are some fine art works of eminent quality. The art of Vanessa Clarke is foremost among the fine art works displayed.

Vanessa Clarke has recently arrived on the Chicago art scene, after completing a BFA degree at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (1998), the Artist Studio Exchange Program with Florence, Italy, and studies at the Burren College of Art, County Clair, Ireland. In 1998 she was awarded the Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Traveling Scholarship Award in Fine Arts. Her present artwork promises a future that galleries and collectors would do well to note now.

Vanessa Clarke has exhibited at, among others, the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago (1998); Norris Gallery, St.Charles, Illinois (1998); the Smart Museum, Chicago (1998); Artscape, Chicago (1998); and the Instituto Statale d'Arte at Porto Romano, Florence, Italy (1997). Her paintings and sculptures are in numerous private collections in Ireland, Italy, Florida, Illinois and Minnesota.

Clarke's artist's statement is straightforward, intelligent and informative. She states: "Currently I am concentrating on three concepts: balance, connections and separations. Balance, and the lack thereof, can produce exciting visual images. In some of my work I enjoy the challenge of counterbalancing weight. How one thing relates to another and what can happen if additional pieces are added. There is a challenge to forming an integration of elements." She continues: "But looking at a piece can be not unlike looking at clouds, one individual may see a completely different form than the next. I clue others into my work with my titles which form the contextual relation. This allows others to connect with the painting or sculpture, understanding or applying different associations to the piece."

The paintings immediately suggest an affinity with the gifts of Paul Klee and bring to mind as well the contributions of Rayonnisme. Rayonnisme was defined in 1913 by its first proponent, the Russian painter Larionov, as "concerned with the special forms which may arise from the intersection of reflected rays from different objects, forms selected by the artist at will."

In Clarke's watercolors with collage elements, one can discern the artist sensing her themes in sculptural terms of planes and cut surfaces, that are schematically translated into two dimensions by the necessities of painting. Because this treatment seems to proceed from her sculptural creativity, rather than any direct legacy from Rayonnisme, Clarke's lines and shapes are clear, incisive and yet preeminently flowing. The watercolors create an impression of looking through transparencies of mobiles, each level superimposed in layers upon a prior isograph. Ambiguous forms emerge out of suites of lines and bounded, but correlated spaces to create the impression of objects and motion. The effect is often akin to what Rodin achieved in his rapid sketches of dancers. He was also a sculptor who caught motion in unyielding stone. Clarke separates intersected areas with contrasting fills that further enhance the feeling of foreground and midground layers within the plane before the viewer. Vanessa Clarke's paintings seem to exist in a dynamic and non-Euclidean geometry of the mind's eye. In addition, her washes and use of variegated brush strokes in the watercolors add a further sense of liquid spatiality. Often there is the feeling that the image's light sources are encrypted within areas of the painting's plane, somewhat like the ethereal light of Byzantine icons.

The paintings bring Klee to mind because he once said that he wished to capture in some of his works the vision seen before birth, when the nascent senses are untutored by a concrete experience of the physical world. Musicians and mathematicians agree that before notations and formulas, they conceive their creations as inarticulate spacial, often visual relationships and movements. This may be what Klee and his admirers in the Ecole de Paris -- Viera da Silva, Jean Bazine, Roger Bissiere, Alfred Manessier -- were seeking to capture. Clarke's works are at home in that analogical sensorium.

A Painting brings within its image its own light scheme to the viewer. Freestanding sculpture must more directly rely on illumination external to it, and on the manner in which it is set up for display. Unless it is bas-relief, it will be viewed from all angles and in various lighting arrangements. Vanessa Clarke's sculptures reveal a sensitive and comprehensive feel for mass, dimensionality and surface; they view well from all angles, and in differing lightings. She is fully aware that sculptural expression depends as much on the allocation of empty space as on the shaping of the material itself. Her pieces exhibit an admirable sense of volume and its interplay with deep recess and supple relief. Her pacing of close, 'busy' configuration with contrasting smooth, uninterrupted surface; her compositional judgements of raw or textured scoring to harmonize or contrast with flat planes or sinuous curves -- all are expert. They strike the viewer; her sculpture is anything but inert material. This is especially eye-catching in works such as "Hidden History" (1998) and "Unite." (1998).

One thing which intrigued me was the attributed dates of creation. I realize that few weighty granite or marble or limestone and steel items, even of such manageable proportions, could hardly be brought home easily after working abroad. The twelve sculptures presented range in size from 5"x2"x18" (in the case of the limestone "Change, Force" ) to 1.5'x1'x4.5' (the dimensions of the limestone "Hidden History"). The 1998 works I've seen represent an impressive run of high quality art. But then, Vanessa Clarke's resume attests to her intense dedication to her art. She has called her thoughts and feelings on making art, not a matter of direct understanding but "more of a curious mystery... an abstraction or, if you will, a continuous circle of endless possibilities or... questions." The finest artists, the more they work fervently at their art, gain energy, an innate awareness of life and further inspirations. Vanessa Clarke is a young artist, but one in whom the contemporary art world will gain much. Her work is worth seeking out. And it will be a wise art collector who follows and nurtures her art.

--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.