In Maisterra’s ‘Passing Through the Body,’ aged is the centerfold
Narciso Maisterra and Hillyer Art Space -
Narciso Maisterra’s images of bodies, such as in “Reclining Nude With Plastic Wrap No. 5,” are hardly glamorized, and even evoke supermarket meat.
Spanish artist Narciso Maisterra has pursued many forms and styles in his 50-year career, but the work in “Passing Through the Body Without Staying” doesn’t simply display his latest phase. The exhibition of masterly pastels, at Hillyer Art Space, documents his return to making art after an illness that left him both weakened and transformed. After regaining use of his right arm, Maisterra began a series of drawings that depict his altered, somewhat droopy visage. These are contrasted by nude women, younger and firmer but hardly glamorized. Although the artist isn’t coy about anatomy, he doesn’t deal in centerfold-model perfection.
If the show’s title is ambiguous, it must refer, at least in part, to the transience of the human form. Perhaps it’s the soul that passes through the body, but Maisterra’s work is not metaphysical. He’s adept at modeling and shading fleshly contours, and his subjects are often awkwardly posed to emphasize the sheer corporeality of their presence. The figures are wrapped in plastic wrap, like so much supermarket meat, or held in awkward, partially suspended poses by ropes. (The bound women are not an expression of a male artist’s control over female subjects; the models tie themselves in positions they choose.)
(Timothy Johnson and Touchstone Gallery) - At Touchstone, artist Timothy Johnson appears to have painted himself as Hypnos, the god of sleep.
The figure drawings don’t emphasize faces; only a single model returns the viewer’s gaze. One drawing depicts the artist’s head at the front of the composition, with a nude in the background, further emphasizing the distinction between head and body, and old and young.
Maisterra works in Palencia, his birthplace, but he spent nearly 20 years in the United States during the 1960s and ’70s. He’s still a frequent visitor to this country, where his grown daughters live. There’s little evidence of American or modernist influence, however, in these pastels. The technique is classical, and suggests Goya’s later work. Maisterra’s drawings aren’t as haunted as that artist’s “black paintings,” but both starkly reveal an older man’s vision of life and self.
Passing Through the Body Without Staying
on view through March 29 at Hillyer Arts Space, 9 Hillyer Ct. NW; 202-338-0680; www.artsandartrists.org.
Timothy Johnson
Coincidentally, there are near-nude figures, self-portraits and even a Narcissus in Timothy Johnson’s “It’s Greek to Me.” The Touchstone Gallery show is a little more playful than Maisterra’s, though. Johnson paints mythological personages in modern, often mundane situations. His Narcissus stands in a small modern kitchen, wearing only white underpants and staring at his reflection in a shiny toaster. A few of the lustier gods, who sometimes took the forms of birds to have their way with humans, are here represented by rubber ducks.
Many of the pictures feature a balding, gray-bearded man who must represent the artist himself. He appears as Hypnos, the embodiment of sleep, but also as Icarus, the heedless youngster who flew too close to the sun. This Icarus seems old enough to have known better; at least he was wearing sunglasses when he took that reckless flight. Such female characters as Persephone also tend to appear older than their dewy depictions in Renaissance myth paintings, reflecting experience rather than innocence.
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