MASSACHUSETTS
New Talent
Alpha Gallery • Boston, MA • www.alphagallery.com
Abraham Storer, Blue Hill, oil on board, 12 x 13 1/2", 2008. |
New Talent, Alpha Gallery’s annual showcase for young area artists, features painters Jonathan Daly, Adrienne Rae Ginter, Abraham Storer, and photographer Clint Baclawski. Immediately appealing in its energy and imagery, yet with subtly disquieting undercurrents, this adroit selection belies all notions of “summer show” exhibitions.
By definition untamed, the forests of Storer’s tightly focused, majestically scaled paintings attain coherence through repetition, texture, and a restricted palette. In Virgin Forest, two fallen birches create interlocking diagonals that oppose the reiterated isolation of the living trees; but dead leaves, low light, and autumn color insistently evoke absence and loss. The paint handling also weaves gestures of tension and resolution; realistic rendering alternately disperses before, or dominates over, veils and drips of paint, a minuet of representation and dissolution. Equilibrium re-emerges in a startling fling of sky blue that traces a ripple of bark, shadow, and decay measured against imagination—vibrant lichen, absent sky, hope of renewal, joy in art’s artifice. Recalling Munch’s spirit-infused woodlands, the ranks of undifferentiated, stylized trees in Woods (twighlight), painted in closely scraped red-brown, overlap ever more densely, until the encroaching shadows meld with the eponymous twilight, its last soft glow silvering the snow-covered ground. Highlighting the mystery and drama of this quotidian event, the snow’s richly textured paint conveys solidity to match luminosity, physicality to ground restlessness.
Daly’s ultra-realistic rural scenes are equally protean. Compositions rooted in crisp, vernacular naturalness reveal a countervailing traverse in landscapes marked—if not marred—by human presence. Emphasizing this disturbing undertone, darkness and shadow fragment form: a hunter’s head disappears from beneath his hat; a ladder leans against an unsupported roof—an eruption of Francis Bacon in Rockwell Kent. Similarly unresolved are Ginter’s more emotional, disjunctive images. Despite their glossy high color and whimsy, the paintings’ vertiginous perspectives echo life’s impenetrability, and in them presence and absence, treasure and detritus, fantasy and brute fact collide. Baclawski’s lightbox-mounted photographic prints of randomly formed groupings of people bring a similar unease and sense of irresolution.
Interweaving affirmation with uncertainty, the engaging works in New Talent capture the two essential qualities of summer: palpable, welcoming beauty and poignant ephemerality.
—Susan Boulanger
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