In his previous life, as an op-ed illustrator for this newspaper and other publications, David Suter was known for his elegant line, visual wit and M.C. Escher-like transitions and juxtapositions. He worked for The Post in the ’70s, sketching the Watergate trials. Now a gallery artist who splits the difference between painting and sculpture, Suter has packed away his pens. But reminders of his previous work are plentiful in “Outside the Box,” at Gallery A. (The show’s two largest paintings are upstairs at Alex Gallery.) Suter employs elementary images and weathered wood, yet his homespun art pulls a few tricks.
According to the show’s handsome catalogue, Suter terms himself a “Constructivist Expressionist.” That doesn’t seem quite right, and yet it does cover many of his interests. His style draws on early-20th-century French and Russian art — although its rough textures are not very Constructivist — and depicts subjects that are either timeless or in a state of perpetual change. The cunningly designed “Running Man,” for example, is a blocky wooden figure that appears to be jumping into a mirror, and whose reflection from certain angles shows a head that isn’t really there. (It’s actually a bent arm.)
Suter likes things that are, or can be, other things. That explains his interest in centaurs, half man and half horse, and why “Bride with Gantry” depicts a nuptial couple that’s also a rocket and the crane supporting it. His paintings are often bordered by expanses of worn lumber, occasionally mingled with metal or painted in metallic tones, but a few of the frames are more delicate: “Dominion” is cradled by a lattice that suggests a Frank Lloyd Wright design, and the curved slats around “The Surfers” mimic the lines of its painted wave. The colors, unusually subdued for acrylics, are sometimes painted on masonry, or evoke ceramics, as in the Greco-Roman assemblage “Eschaton.”
Several of the most appealingly direct pictures, including “Binarity” and “Four Flowers,” feel archetypal. But no object is perpetual, and much of Suter’s art is anxious for metamorphosis, even if the transition is just from painting to sculpture.
Alexander Vasiljev
The title of “Mystify,” Alexander Vasiljev’s show of photographs at Watergate Gallery, is in part a pun. These rich, deep-focus images were made in Peru’s remote Wax Palm Forest, whose towering trees are often cloaked in fog. Most of the 18 photos are simply titled “Mist,” followed by a number, and all but one of those is a panoramic view of thick woodland enveloped in blue-gray vapor. Adding to the beguiling haze, Vasiljev gives his photos an encaustic (wax and resin) coating, applied in painterly strokes. He also mounts them on wooden boxes to give them heft as well as depth.
“Mystify” is not all mist and muted-color foliage. One four-exposure piece shows a bird against a bone-white sky, swooping from panel to panel. And sunlight plays a limited but potent role in several of the other photos, which reveal pools of light deep within the forest. The product of an unseen sun whose rays somehow penetrated both the clouds and the tree canopy, these spotlights appear natural, yet eerily theatrical. They draw the eye deep into the image, past the encaustic, through the clouds and perhaps even into the mystic.
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