Spotlight Reviews

Christine Vaillancourt, Techno-Retro, exhibition view

RHODE ISLAND

Newport Art Museum/Newport
www.newportartmuseum.com
CHRISTINE VAILLANCOURT: TECHNO-RETRO

Christine Vaillancourt’s highly charged acrylic paintings of geometric shapes in depth-structured but ambiguous space capture a universe of associations, from the boomerang Formica of the fifties to yesterday’s computer-enhanced images of deep space. The eleven works on view lyrically revisit the emotional arc of the last five decades’ propulsive technological drive, puncturing NAM’s surprisingly hospitable neoclassical Cushing Gallery with new windows opening onto the twenty-first century. At the same time, Vaillancourt pays close attention to key modernist esthetic traditions from throughout the twentieth century. Without sacrificing a distinctive touch and idiom, her assertive but madly multiplied simple solids evoke Malevich’s squares, for example. And her deliberately limited palette and vibrating energy pay freeform homage to Mondrian, quite openly in the Yellow, Red, Black Composition series of works on paper (2004).
Circles, ovals, squares, and rectangles, solid and outlined, tumble and lap across as many as six layers of translucent acrylic medium, whose waxlike qualities further obscure or unexpectedly mirror and isolate the floating forms. Countering the shapes’ sober simplicity is their dancing and nongeometrical nonalignment. In large-scale paintings such as Green Transit Data (2003), the pulsing energy develops an organized thrust that, if not for the countervailing serenity of its misty acrylic layers and luscious green, gray, white, and black tones, might seem about to upend us into an unknown and thus potentially threatening dimension opening right at our feet.

Christine Vaillancourt, Deconstruct, acrylic on linen, 80 x 60", 2004.

     Nebula (2003), a dominatingly large multipanel work built on perfect squares, offers a denser, more ambiguous and brooding interpretation of these forces. Darkness seeps in at the edges, and large, benignly shaped but assertively white voids punctuate the layered depths. The seams between the panels both interrupt and refocus attention, creating a reverberant perceptual static that engages and reengages the viewer in pondering the ebb and flow, avoidance and encounter, revelation and concealment of forms, patterns, and colors.
     The most recent work in the show, Data Morph, also seems in many ways the most personal and provocative. The canvas shares the eye-popping color, scale, and freedom of the Composition series, but among the by now familiar regular shapes appear others quite unabashedly morphing, evolving, taking on a weight and swing that recall the sensuous organic morphology of Arp or the formal inventiveness and movement of Calder. A vibrant red seems to jostle for prominence, simultaneously floating free and escaping or even suppressing the other more recessive forms. The shapes, proportionally larger than those in other works and pushed closer to the surface, claim for themselves both individuality and centrality; they shift focus from the containment and balanced stillness and energy of the other works to create a new palpability, insistence, and urgency.
     The future presses; it doesn’t stand still, and we have only imagination with which to prepare for its advance. Displaying the artist’s awareness of and sensitivity to these forces, the paintings in Techno-Retro capture the vital challenge that this vertiginous restlessness represents. At the same time they offer a revitalizing and comforting esthetic charge—a jolt of pleasure— and provide a paradoxically solid foothold in reality’s shifting realm.

Susan Boulanger

Also reviewed in this issue:

Big Sky Series and Rebloom/Reclaim by Sandra Aarons Krupp at Number Two Marlborough Gallery
Pandemic: Imaging AIDS at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University