Reviews: Vermont

Christopher Ulivo and Julian Kreimer
Lenore Gray Gallery • Providence, RI

Christopher Ulivo’s gouache-on-panel paintings are alternatively savage and satirical, blurring the line between the authentic and the artificial in scenes that merge thrill-seeking adventure with mundane activity.

In Life in the Poles: Orca and Prehistoric Park: Pterodactyl Attacking a Caveman, human bodies are snacked on by beasts. The amusing Filming the Moon Landing—May 1969 is a wink and a nod to the conspiracy theory that America’s first moon landing was staged. A draped black curtain, camera crew, moon buggy, and crater-filled lunar surface set the scene in a wry image that suggests an elaborate New Yorker cartoon, missing only the caption.

Ulivo’s dinosaur paintings are particularly engrossing. In Prehistoric Park: Tyrannosaur, a man leans over a toppled tyrannosaurus rex, truncated at the shins (its feet stick up from concrete a short distance away). In Prehistoric Park: Brontosaurus, a man in a lawn chair guzzles a beer and feeds Wonder Bread to a gaggle of geese in a run-down park, while staring at a giant brontosaurus mounted on a walkway. All of Ulivo’s images are marked by wild, streaking skies and actions that suggest life on the edge in an age of the modern primitive.

Julian Kreimer’s oil-on-linen scenes have an entirely different sensibility, but are equally intriguing. While the titles convey simple notions of landscape features—Woods, Tunnel, Rocks, Boats—the images are often complex and compelling. Kreimer discovers cold beauty and moody resonance in odd spaces by presenting scenes that are visually busy but strangely quiet in content and devoid of people.

Gated Arcade repeats motifs of passageways and doorways in a dynamic convergence of lines and the hard forms of urban geometry. The starkly beautiful Lite Tree conveys the jarring illumination of a tree wrapped in holiday lights on a city sidewalk. The shapely pre-landscape Building a Park presents the detritus of construction as viewed through a chain-link fence with yellow tape stretching across diagonally. A sense of entrapment and escape emerges amid the metallic tones of Tunnel, while the mysterious Woods enchants as a barren forest of gnarled and tangled trees, fading into ghosts.

—Doug Norris

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