There are also four mixed-media wall pieces by Joan Konkel, anchored to painted canvases or stark aluminum panels; she sometimes breaks their rectangular planes by hanging strips of canvas or mesh ruffles from them.
Metal can’t dangle like fabric, but many of these pieces suggest motion. Wolff renders soft curves with such hard materials as bronze and acrylic, and he gives them such titles as “Dancer.” His most intriguing piece here, “The Wave,” is made of slightly translucent black glass that, like dark water, offers a limited view of what’s beneath the surface. Alluding to the ocean in a different way, two of Julie Giardini’s steel, bronze and copper pieces take boatlike forms.
Some of the steel sculptures taunt gravity. Rubenstein’s “Wave Roller” stacks circles and slashes to evoke a swell that’s about break onshore, and his “Breathe” is a pileup of metal lozenges that spirals 81
/
2 feet in the air. David Hubbard’s contributions include “Monument to Up,” which places a chevron atop a sphere atop a rounded pyramid, and “Ascension Model,” in which squiggles of seemingly floating steel are joined by three curved rods. It’s not quite an illusion, since the rods are visible, as much as an expression of strength. When artists command metal to hover in space, even the airiest of sculptures is a show of force.
Clyde Fowler
One of the purported goals of post-painterly abstraction was to eliminate the surface: Pigment and canvas would become one. Some 50 years later, abstract painters are emphasizing the skin of their work, using glazes, resins and other materials to create a topside sheen. Clyde Fowler, whose “Pictorial Choreography” is showing at Long View Gallery, blends diamond dust into oil paint to add a subtle sparkle to pictures on canvas and paper.
Fowler arrays blurry-edged blocks of color with smaller shapes and occasional lines, evoking early-20th-century abstraction and sometimes Paul Klee. The colors are mostly muted, with lots of gray and tan, although the artist occasionally interjects a hot shade of orange. He generally uses a vertical format, perhaps to prevent his paintings from being seen as landscapes. (One untitled work, part of a suite of nine, nonetheless does: Its glimmer of yellow on a field of dark reds and near-blacks suggests light in the distance.) The paintings on canvas are more heavily worked, with some scratching of the paint; the ones on paper are more serene and, in some ways, more appealing. But both glisten alluringly, their surfaces attracting attention to their depths.
Loading...
Comments