ARTISTS
Black on Blonde
Best in Show Recommendations by R. C. Baker Robert Colescott Kravets Wehby 521 West 21st Street Through November 11 Black on Blonde A black man
R.C. Baker / Village Voice
01 Nov, 2006
Best in Show
Recommendations by R. C. Baker
Robert Colescott
Kravets Wehby
521 West 21st Street
Through November 11
Black on Blonde
A black man crouches between the legs of a blonde, his tongue out, "How `bout this?" scrawled above his head. She (a pink version of a Picasso-style African mask) answers, "My Mom`s calling me!" If ribald interracial sex were all the African American Colescott (born 1925) delivered, his work might be dismissed as underground comix on canvas. But this student of Fernand L茅ger once watched Diego Rivera paint a mural, and politically charged figures (a wildly unpopular genre at the time Colescott matured, under abstract expressionism`s hegemony) have long filled his compositions with lush imagery. Seven feet high, The Sphinx Speaks (1993) portrays men, women, and a skeleton in jagged magenta-and-black stripes. A small, naked white male whispers devilishly into ` the ear of a black minstrel-like man who has huge white eyes and thick pink lips wrapped around a cigar, and is wearing a red-and-blue-striped tie that counterpoints a rainbow in the opposite quadrant of the canvas. Second Thoughts on Eternity (1991) includes a golden Anubis (Colescott once studied and taught in Egypt); a smiling, bearded white Godhead; a frowning, white-bearded black man; and, prominently, a chick with a dick. These complex paintings offer enigmatic tales to be unraveled and righteous polemics to be considered, while transcending their outrageousness with balls-out beauty.
`Ambroise Vollard: Patron of the Avant-Garde`
The French art dealer Ambroise Vollard (1867-1939) championed some of art`s heaviest hitters: C茅zanne, Matisse, Gauguin, Picasso. Highlights of work that passed through the French dealer`s hands include a portrait of Madame C茅zanne; her husband has painted her in a high-collared, tightly knotted gown the color of dried blood, her hair pulled severely back, her fingers stiffly entwined-less a muse than a goad. A particularly unhinged van Gogh night scene fixates on orange city lights striating black and blue water; a small, dark couple on the beach stares out at the viewer as if posing fora snapshot. Metropolitan Museum, 1000 Fifth Ave, 212-535-7710. Through Jan 7.
Gregory Conniff
Although shot in black-and-white, these 21/2 x 3-foot photographs hark back to earlier landscape painting-say, a 19th-century Constable with tumbledown cottage and overgrown fields abutting towering trees. Conniff seeks out similar intersections of civilization and nature: In a Mississippi scene, telephone wires plunge down a dark, encroaching valley under steely clouds with radiant, sweeping edges. Another work veers into abstraction with the verve of calligraphy-bare branches and spidery vines are scribbled across a gray field that recedes into a distant white limbo. CandaceDwan, 24 W 57th, 212-315-0065. Through Nov 4.
Fred Tomaselli
Trapped air bubbles fizz from pills sealed in a thick coat of resin; a bird of prey, its feathers a resplendent collage of flower photographs, pins a snake, itself a writhing mass of smaller serpent images, to a tree branch. Tomaselli crams his large paintings with actual objects (painted trees sprout real leaves and the shiny resin heightens every vein) and cutouts from magazines and medical texts, then adds swirling loops and mandatas of bright gouache to achieve a visual overload that is strangely quiet and reflective-a slow-motion hallucination, fames Cohan, 533 W 26th, 212-714-9500. Through Nov 11.
Alexander Creswell
Watercolor is a technically brutal medium (every stroke must be right, since mistakes can`t be erased or scraped down), which makes these majestic images of Italian churches all the more thrilling. Creswell sketches his compositions in pencil and then applies vibrant color with deft, lively brush work. Painstaking observation captures the bursts of sunlight that enlivened sacred spaces before electricity; he is keenly sensitive to the reflection of light from statue to sacristy to stairwell and the way these glowing surfaces adulterate shadows in the recesses of marble architecture. This painterly high-wire act continues amid the trusses and girders of the Queensboro Bridge, its anchoring stone arch and iron roadbed a radiant orange in the sunrise. Hirschl & Adler, 21 E 70th, 212-535-8810. Through Nov 4.
Liselot van der Heijdon
This artist from the Netherlands is as outraged by the Bush administration as many Americans are. You enter the gallery by pushing aside a glowing scrim on which a snake winding and unwinding inside a white box is projected; a second video features two white mice skittering around an apple. A real-time feed from a tiny surveillance camera creates a third projection, adding the viewer`s image to these symbols of sin and corruption. A nearby TV plays a loop of the president`s State of the Union speeches, edited so the word evil is proclaimed over and over again and closing with "God is near." Even more frightening than the commander in chiefs biblical absolutism is the thunderous applause it evokes. LMAK Projects, 526 W26th, 212-255-9707. Through Nov 11.
Joel-Peter Witkin
Witkin`s photographic grotesqueries channel the classical past: A beautiful woman with amputated arms becomes a modern Venus de Milo, accessorized with bra and pet dog; Queer Saint (1999) imagines an arrow-pierced human skeleton toppndby nn animal skull, the only flesh a large, drooping penis. With their distressed, stained backgrounds, these black-and-white prints feel like daguerreo-type curiosities, and Witkin`s staging of nudes (some with grievous wounds) amid flowing fabrics and vaguely exotic trappings recalls the DIY tableaux vivants of East Village theater genius Jack Smith. Keith de Lellis, 47 E 68th,212-327-1482. Through Nov 25.
Michael Eastman
While grabbing some six-packs in a Miami dive, Hunter Thompson once spied "a ruined platinum-blonde Cuban dazzler" haranguing her cheapskate date. Michael Eastman`s large (some are over six feet tall) color photographs of Havana`s once grand mansions capture that same sense of faded glory and lost riches. Now paint sags from soaring ceilings ringed by battered plaster molding; a tarnished chandelier seems to sob crystal tears over a vast room furnished with drying laundry strung above two tattered easy chairs. Yet even as the tropical light reveals every chip in a marble staircase and stain on a wall, it also saturates the pastel colors of the elegant archways, imbuing these images with a grande dame`s dignified beauty. Claire Oliver, 513 W 26th, 212-929-5949. Through Nov 11.
SIDEBAR
Detail of Robert Colescott`s The Sphinx Speaks, 1993
FIND MANY MORE ART LISTINGS ON LINE AT VILLAGEVOICE.COM/ ART
COPYRIGHT: Copyright Village Voice Nov 1-Nov 7, 2006. Provided by Proquest- CSA, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Only fair use as provided by the United States copyright law is permitted.
PROQUEST-CSA, LLC- MAKES NO WARRANTY REGARDING THE ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, OR TIMELINESS OF THE LICENSED MATERIALS OR ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.
Recommendations by R. C. Baker
Robert Colescott
Kravets Wehby
521 West 21st Street
Through November 11
Black on Blonde
A black man crouches between the legs of a blonde, his tongue out, "How `bout this?" scrawled above his head. She (a pink version of a Picasso-style African mask) answers, "My Mom`s calling me!" If ribald interracial sex were all the African American Colescott (born 1925) delivered, his work might be dismissed as underground comix on canvas. But this student of Fernand L茅ger once watched Diego Rivera paint a mural, and politically charged figures (a wildly unpopular genre at the time Colescott matured, under abstract expressionism`s hegemony) have long filled his compositions with lush imagery. Seven feet high, The Sphinx Speaks (1993) portrays men, women, and a skeleton in jagged magenta-and-black stripes. A small, naked white male whispers devilishly into ` the ear of a black minstrel-like man who has huge white eyes and thick pink lips wrapped around a cigar, and is wearing a red-and-blue-striped tie that counterpoints a rainbow in the opposite quadrant of the canvas. Second Thoughts on Eternity (1991) includes a golden Anubis (Colescott once studied and taught in Egypt); a smiling, bearded white Godhead; a frowning, white-bearded black man; and, prominently, a chick with a dick. These complex paintings offer enigmatic tales to be unraveled and righteous polemics to be considered, while transcending their outrageousness with balls-out beauty.
`Ambroise Vollard: Patron of the Avant-Garde`
The French art dealer Ambroise Vollard (1867-1939) championed some of art`s heaviest hitters: C茅zanne, Matisse, Gauguin, Picasso. Highlights of work that passed through the French dealer`s hands include a portrait of Madame C茅zanne; her husband has painted her in a high-collared, tightly knotted gown the color of dried blood, her hair pulled severely back, her fingers stiffly entwined-less a muse than a goad. A particularly unhinged van Gogh night scene fixates on orange city lights striating black and blue water; a small, dark couple on the beach stares out at the viewer as if posing fora snapshot. Metropolitan Museum, 1000 Fifth Ave, 212-535-7710. Through Jan 7.
Gregory Conniff
Although shot in black-and-white, these 21/2 x 3-foot photographs hark back to earlier landscape painting-say, a 19th-century Constable with tumbledown cottage and overgrown fields abutting towering trees. Conniff seeks out similar intersections of civilization and nature: In a Mississippi scene, telephone wires plunge down a dark, encroaching valley under steely clouds with radiant, sweeping edges. Another work veers into abstraction with the verve of calligraphy-bare branches and spidery vines are scribbled across a gray field that recedes into a distant white limbo. CandaceDwan, 24 W 57th, 212-315-0065. Through Nov 4.
Fred Tomaselli
Trapped air bubbles fizz from pills sealed in a thick coat of resin; a bird of prey, its feathers a resplendent collage of flower photographs, pins a snake, itself a writhing mass of smaller serpent images, to a tree branch. Tomaselli crams his large paintings with actual objects (painted trees sprout real leaves and the shiny resin heightens every vein) and cutouts from magazines and medical texts, then adds swirling loops and mandatas of bright gouache to achieve a visual overload that is strangely quiet and reflective-a slow-motion hallucination, fames Cohan, 533 W 26th, 212-714-9500. Through Nov 11.
Alexander Creswell
Watercolor is a technically brutal medium (every stroke must be right, since mistakes can`t be erased or scraped down), which makes these majestic images of Italian churches all the more thrilling. Creswell sketches his compositions in pencil and then applies vibrant color with deft, lively brush work. Painstaking observation captures the bursts of sunlight that enlivened sacred spaces before electricity; he is keenly sensitive to the reflection of light from statue to sacristy to stairwell and the way these glowing surfaces adulterate shadows in the recesses of marble architecture. This painterly high-wire act continues amid the trusses and girders of the Queensboro Bridge, its anchoring stone arch and iron roadbed a radiant orange in the sunrise. Hirschl & Adler, 21 E 70th, 212-535-8810. Through Nov 4.
Liselot van der Heijdon
This artist from the Netherlands is as outraged by the Bush administration as many Americans are. You enter the gallery by pushing aside a glowing scrim on which a snake winding and unwinding inside a white box is projected; a second video features two white mice skittering around an apple. A real-time feed from a tiny surveillance camera creates a third projection, adding the viewer`s image to these symbols of sin and corruption. A nearby TV plays a loop of the president`s State of the Union speeches, edited so the word evil is proclaimed over and over again and closing with "God is near." Even more frightening than the commander in chiefs biblical absolutism is the thunderous applause it evokes. LMAK Projects, 526 W26th, 212-255-9707. Through Nov 11.
Joel-Peter Witkin
Witkin`s photographic grotesqueries channel the classical past: A beautiful woman with amputated arms becomes a modern Venus de Milo, accessorized with bra and pet dog; Queer Saint (1999) imagines an arrow-pierced human skeleton toppndby nn animal skull, the only flesh a large, drooping penis. With their distressed, stained backgrounds, these black-and-white prints feel like daguerreo-type curiosities, and Witkin`s staging of nudes (some with grievous wounds) amid flowing fabrics and vaguely exotic trappings recalls the DIY tableaux vivants of East Village theater genius Jack Smith. Keith de Lellis, 47 E 68th,212-327-1482. Through Nov 25.
Michael Eastman
While grabbing some six-packs in a Miami dive, Hunter Thompson once spied "a ruined platinum-blonde Cuban dazzler" haranguing her cheapskate date. Michael Eastman`s large (some are over six feet tall) color photographs of Havana`s once grand mansions capture that same sense of faded glory and lost riches. Now paint sags from soaring ceilings ringed by battered plaster molding; a tarnished chandelier seems to sob crystal tears over a vast room furnished with drying laundry strung above two tattered easy chairs. Yet even as the tropical light reveals every chip in a marble staircase and stain on a wall, it also saturates the pastel colors of the elegant archways, imbuing these images with a grande dame`s dignified beauty. Claire Oliver, 513 W 26th, 212-929-5949. Through Nov 11.
SIDEBAR
Detail of Robert Colescott`s The Sphinx Speaks, 1993
FIND MANY MORE ART LISTINGS ON LINE AT VILLAGEVOICE.COM/ ART
COPYRIGHT: Copyright Village Voice Nov 1-Nov 7, 2006. Provided by Proquest- CSA, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Only fair use as provided by the United States copyright law is permitted.
PROQUEST-CSA, LLC- MAKES NO WARRANTY REGARDING THE ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, OR TIMELINESS OF THE LICENSED MATERIALS OR ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.
