Going to the show

NewAbstract Paintings

Justin Bower and Chris Trueman @ Alexander Salazar Fine Art

Suppose you’re into Brit-pop and you just happen to stumble into Alexander Salazar’s Downtown art space and see one of Justin Bower’s large-scale face portraits. The grandiosity, detail and scale of the pieces alone are enough to knock you for a loop, but there’s something eerily familiar about pieces like “First Blue Boy” and “Synthetic Gaze.” Then it hits you. This is the same artist who did all the Manic Street Preachers record covers! But it’s not. That would be a British artist named Jenny Saville, and it’d be unfair to speculate whether or not Bower was influenced by Saville’s work. Bower’s work is affecting only because of its scale and the intentionally disturbing elements of cyber-surrealism that run throughout. Walking a tightrope between photorealism and abstraction is nothing new when it comes to portraiture, but Bower does it well, and I suppose there’s a market for that. Bay Area artist Chris Trueman, whose work is also up through May 28, is up to his neck in lyrical abstraction. Shades of artists like Norman Bluhm and Alfred Manessier are all over Trueman’s work, but the pieces he has up never feel overtly derivative. However, they don’t feel wholly original either. alexandersalazarfineart.com

VIVA MEXICO! @ Mingei International Museum

A tiny skeleton atop a banana occupies one of the smallest displays of the exhibition, but might serve as a decent guide to this celebration of the bizarre, sublime and everyday. VIVA MEXICO!, Mingei’s tribute to the 200th anniversary of Mexican independence (which runs through January 2011), is a piñata explosion of folk-art goodies ranging from commonplace objects like jugs and rugs to the giant tree-of-life sculptures drenched in the motley imagery of the Mexican imagination. Adam, Eve, gods and goddesses, doughy-faced devils, mariachi skeletons and larger-than-life skulls all show up in multiple forms at this party that doesn’t care whether it’s a funeral or feast. It’s hard not to admire the relentless energy of the Mexican spirit captured by the artisans of these 105 contemporary-art objects. Humor and tragedy, the cheerful and grotesque, pagan and Christian are blended together so casually that one starts doubting their differences. While the darlings of Europe’s history might be memorialized in cold marble, Emiliano Zapata, a hero of the Mexican Revolution, here depicted in clay, looks friendly enough to stick in a toddler’s crib. mingei.org

Jazz @ Edgeware Gallery

A central theme can prove a useful device for bringing unity to an art show involving multiple artists, but that same a priori centrality may deaden as often as inspire. Indeed, Jazz, a group exhibit running at Kensington’s Edgeware Gallery through June 27, includes much work that merely presents to the observer a simple reflection of pre-established iconography. Such reflections may be pleasant, good-spirited and prettily composed, but they lack a certain energy and surprise, qualities one might usually associate with jazz itself. The show does, however, include some effective pieces that make it worth a visit. Frank Vicino’s “Le Jazz” juxtaposes geometrically defined figures against a relatively serene background, suggesting the infusion of bold American notes into an old-world familiarity. Pat Kenney surprises with the medium itself, weaving lively and whimsical, jazz-based imagery into a colorful and well-balanced quilt. And I was particularly impressed by the painting “Behind the Iron Curtain” by Conrad Mecheski and Maura Vazakas. This piece is alive with surreal symbology and wacky representations, pointing to the themes of music and performance without ever being bound by them. Most importantly, it expresses the mystery, wildness and cool self-confidence of jazz itself. edgewaregallery.com

Drawings and Paintings @ Quint Contemporary Art

If Cesare Pavese was right, the surest way to arouse a sense of wonder is to stare unafraid at a single object. Such a task seems impossible today, if not evidence of madness, but it is this type of relentless focus that colors the work of German artist Peter Dreher. In 1974, he began painting still lifes of a single water glass, a project that ultimately turned into a daily, lifelong practice. The resulting series, “Tag um Tag Guter Tag (Day by Day a Good Day),” now contains 4,800 works with zero change in color scheme, orientation or size. Like a filmstrip whose progression isn’t immediately clear, two-dozen paintings from this series line the walls of Quint Contemporary Art in Drawings and Paintings (on display through June 5). The initial sense of repetition becomes the framework for the dreamy dance of light on the glass. Dreher’s intention to paint each still life “with total restraint” and “without uniqueness” is an accidental critique of visual sensationalism, for these paintings are eye magnets regardless. The subject, which does not seem to be the glass at all, is not thrust upon the viewer but, rather, only quietly revealed to the extent that one looks. quintgallery.com

NewAbstract Paintings @ Scott White Contemporary Art

In the high-definition, mega-pixilated world we inhabit, it’s no surprise that Scott White has already branded Brooklyn-via-Mexico City artist Victor Rodriguez one of the new leaders of contemporary photorealism. The act of taking a picture, or even recalling a memory, and creating an exact facsimile in paint can be a meticulous and painstaking process, but how often is the transformation visually worthwhile?  Sometimes photorealism—and its more precise offshoot, hyperrealism—can lack profundity and catharsis and just feel masturbatory. Not so with Rodriguez, whose large-scale, subversive twists on the movement are revelatory and playful. One of the pieces in the show, “NewAbstract #5 (Blue Pill),” is an amalgam of a dozen smaller-scale paintings combined to give a collage effect. There’s a painting of a woman’s foot next to an eye next to the Seven Dwarves, and it continues until the sum of its parts result in a dissident take on sexuality and culture. What makes Rodriguez unique is not only that he combines two seemingly different schools of art; it’s also that he does so in a way that seems effortless. He’s graduated from realism to real-life and from abstraction to figurativeness. It’s as defining a moment as an artist is likely to have and as real as anything else you’re likely to encounter outside of a gallery. scottwhiteart.com