Spotlight Review

Vico Fabbris, Susan Lyman, Michael Mazur, Nathalie Miebach: Second Nature
Provincetown Art Association and Museum • Provincetown, MA • www.paam.org

In Second Nature, Vico Fabbris, Susan Lyman, Michael Mazur, and Nathalie Miebach present a show that is not only smart and succinct, but serves as an eloquently understated indictment of the growing fissure of detachment between human nature and the natural world.

Fabbris paints exquisitely rendered watercolors of single-stem flowers, with the loving, classical detail one would expect from botanical prints. Though their format may be a nod to old prints and watercolors, all of his flowers—including most of the landscapes in which they exist, and even the faux Latin titles and stories that accompany some of them—come from the artist’s imagination.

Fabbris is not a magical prankster, and surreal is too lazy a term for his floral menagerie of botanical make-believe. Some of his flowers (Nautilusitum for instance) do take on a consciousness that’s a little unnerving, but Fabbris’ catalog of extinct plants—extinct because they never existed in the first place—point to a narrative of neglect, a poetic and theatrical reminder of what we have lost, what we could lose, and what we still have. While Fabbris carries off the conceit well, its seduction is not enough to disguise the full extent and foolish calamity that comes with any species’ demise.

Nathalie Miebach functions as an “aesthetic scientist,” utilizing technology to collect and collate a battery of scientific research—weather, tides, temperature, etc.—that she extrapolates into complex sprawling sculptures: a form of psychedelic basket-weaving reminiscent of satellites and children's construction sets.

Woven and assembled out of wood, data, and reed, these works are essentially three-dimensional paradigms for interpreting the currents of the natural world in new ways. Coded in a repetition of shape and primary colors, all of her forms retain a strong adherence to the spiral, visually rotating through an escalating pirouette of orbs and rods that also imply sound and music. In recent work like Musical Buoy in Search Towards a New Shore, Miebach encrypts the piece with a musical score that can be interpreted and performed.

Susan Lyman presents a series of small paintings and an array of lovingly crafted wall sculptures made of recycled wood. Even with thin washes of color, a painting like Keeper of Cranbourne Chase is more about drawing than painting. It is inscribed with an exploratory Düreresque line that takes a revisionist fascination in detailing an ancient English oak pollard.

Layman's acute visual dissection of old trees and wood takes its most literal form in her wall sculpture. She has a feel for bringing out the best in wood, polishing it into new forms that are alive with human references: the uncanny thrust of a leg or foot, or the pointy clench of a finger.

The work is often lithe and affirmatively poised with a sensuality that takes place in the curl of her forms and smooth caress of her surfaces. Looking at Bedfellows, Layman's theme may well be harmonious coexistence, but she has the ability to offset over-elegance with work like Just Dessert, a squat head form punctuated by a cake-like wedge inserted in one side. The skewed humor, like an errant visual pun, is unexpected.

Michael Mazur was to have exhibited some of his recent pencil drawings of plants, but his passing on August 18 precluded their availability. Instead he is represented by four modest paintings and four masterful woodblock prints affirming that he was an artist deeply attuned to the rhythms of nature.

The woodcuts particularly impress, benefiting as they do from strong direct blocks of color and shape. For all the heroic grace of his large paintings, printmaking—if Tropic is anything to go by—gave him a precise intimacy while maintaining a painterly strength.

Mazur stressed growth as an artist and for an artist at the apex of his creative fecundity, exploring nature as it pertains to human nature meant change: we change and our perceptions along with us. Nathalie Miebach once taught a class called “Making the Invisible Visible” and that appeared to be what Second Nature set out to do: depict nature on the cusp of the literal and the transcendent.

—André van der Wende