Category: Culture

Jules de Balincourt The Watchtower 2005 oil, enamel and spray paint on panel 31″ x 39″

It’s just a terrific show.
Jules de Balincourt’s “This Is Our Town” opened at Zach Feuer’s 24th Street gallery tonight. Barry and I have two pieces we purchased two years ago, before his first one-man show at what was then called LFL Gallery. I have no idea what it would cost to enlarge our modest holdings today, but it wouldn’t surprise me if everything we saw there is already sold. That likelihood and especially our limited household budget mean that from now on I’m going to have to be content with visiting other spaces to see what this artist continues to do with a brush (and occasionally some spray paint or very-mixed media*).
But if it was both constructive and great fun being there early as excited collectors, there’s still loads of excitement in the looking and I’d strongly encourage anyone interested in painting in this new Age of Terror not to miss the show. From the press release:

As suggested by the show’s title, taken from the scoreboard overlooking Madison Square Garden, “This Is Our Town,” explores a tension between leisure, survival, and the polarized paranoia between “us” and “them.” Themes of surveillance, destruction, and looming breaches of privacy comprise this series of playfully sinister works.

Righteous social or political outrage has rarely gone down so gracefully – or so beautifully. The colors alone are worth writing home about, but you’re going to have to be there to really see them.


Jules de Balincourt Untitled 2005 oil and enamel on panel 13″ x 15″

*
Don’t miss the Personal Survival Doom Buggy. Well, actually there’s not a chance you might.

Federico Solmi Rush to Hospital II


Federico Solmi Inside Hospital

Federico Solmi has this fantasy (fantasy fantasy?) about being Rocco Sifreddi,* super-celebrity, fellow-Italian porn star, and he has hand-drawn some 400 frames in order to assemble his own four-minute animated movie, “Rocco Never Dies.” The gallery site offers an excerpt for viewing.
But although in the film Rocco actually does die (of a heart attack, after participating in a large-scale orgy strapped-down as an important cog in “The Fucking Machine”), judging from his own much more creative role in this exercise, Solmi should have a great (art) career ahead of him.
Now that I brought it up, I think I should include an image of that infernal machine, so here it is:


Federico Solmi The Fucking Machine

This neat little show, installed in the second gallery at Boreas, includes a large number of related drawings and several paintings. The paintings are executed on a stiff gauze medium, lightly prepared with a white base, before they receive the elegant line of his black marker. They are extremely attractive, as much as objects as for those beautiful black lines. New York, by the way, has rarely looked so exciting, with the tops of both the Statue of Liberty and the Chryler Building lodged akimbo in the middle of its busy avenues.
Full disclosure: I had seen several works by Solmi over the last year or two and I was intrigued. Late last year we were happy to bring home one of his small enigmatic paintings from the D.U.M.B.O Arts Center benefit, and it now hangs in our apartment. Here is the image, created originally as part of his “Safe Journey Exhibition” (2002-2004):


Federico Solmi Was a BMW oil marker on shaped gauze canvas 9.5″ x 12″

*
I’d never heard of him until I read about this show, even though IMDb lists 252 films under his name. It must be the plots.

[top two images from Federico Solmi, where they are described as drawings; bottom two from Boreas, where the first is described as a still from the video]

Joe Ovelman untitled (jump) 2002

Barry has a post which is a tribute to Joe Ovelman – and also to his D.C. gallery, Connor Contemporary, where his magnificent series, “Snow Queen” (or at least a large part of it) will be shown beginning this Friday.
The images above and below are earlier self-portraits, but Barry has included one of the Snow Queen images on his site. For five more, click onto the artist’s name on Connor’s site.

UPDATE:
Leigh Connor just sent me an email confirming that the entire series (18 works) will be shown in her gallery. She also refreshed my memory that Ovelman’s modest epic was shot in the Cental Park Rambles. This serves as a timely reminder, during the week which sees $21 million of “The Gates” dismantled and hauled away, that art has never been a stranger in New York’s noble greensward.


Joe Ovelman untitled (blue star) 2002

[images from Joe Ovelman]

Monique Luchetti Thorn In My Side 2005 re-braided rugs and commercial carpet, detail


Thorn, full image

Like so many of her contemporaries, male and female, Monique Luchetti delights in bringing what has been conventionally regarded as “women’s work” to the sacred precincts of the art gallery. In her current show at The Phatory, “RNA,” a practical domestic tradition has become almost completely transformed, far beyond the (considerable) labor involved in her physical alteration of (mostly) found materials. These “canvases” evolve into economically-constructed, powerful, abstract and timeless worlds. Or, as the press release would have it,

For this show, Luchetti presents work using second-hand braided rugs and other floor coverings, which she pulls apart and reweaves into works of art. As in cellular regeneration, Luchetti’s work metaphorically decodes the aesthetic blueprints implicit in these formerly utilitarian objects, liberating them from their domestic duty. This transformative process extends the labor of the original weavers who, despite working within pragmatic and cultural confines, imbued their rugs with their own visual aesthetics.

There are now additional images, including some works on paper, uploaded onto Luchetti’s website. Many of these pieces are in the current show, but there’s much more.

[second image from The Phatory]

Vincent Skeltis Mel’s Corral #58 2004 metal, incandescent bulbs, photograph, plexi-glas 48″ x 48″ x 9″

31 Grand‘s press release says that Vincent Skeltis’s show, “Nowhere But Up,” among other things, “explores the death of the American nuclear family.” I suspect that the only thing which has really changed about that almost mythical societal arrangement is what photography can now do, in the hands of an artist, to tell us about it.
This particular family happens to be Skeltis’s own. He has installed a haunting show of photographs and artifacts describing the parallel lives of a father who disappeared into dissipation when his son was four, and the son who by his own admission was well on the way toward destroying himself when their paths crossed twenty-one years later, only ten months before Vincent Skeltis, Sr. died.
It’s a dizzying array of images, of men, women – and things – presented without sentimentality but also without any bitterness. Things happened, people remembered.
Art survives.
Barry and I were walking about Williamsburg with our friend Karen the evening the show opened, and had earlier run into two other friends visiting the same galeries we were. At 31 Grand I was still in something of a daze, struck by the honesty and the strength of what Skeltis had done, when Cory Arcangel and Noah Lyon came in with a mutual friend of their own, Alex Galloway. Cory really loved what he saw, and since I don’t think I’d heard it before, I took his own tribute to the show, “This is like real art!” for high praise indeed. There was no argument.


Vincent Skeltis Nude Portrait of Amy 2003 C-print 40″ x 30″


Vincent Skeltis All Things Considered 2003 framed photograph, pocket knife, cross, camera, music box/flask figurine, scissors, steel, plywood 23.75″ x 19.5″ x 6.75″

[image, “Nude Portrait of Amy,” from 31 Grand]

Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle (but imagine grainy and black & white)

I won’t give any details. That’s the way I myself like to approach a night at the theatre (that is, with just enough information to tell me it’s going to be worth a detour) and that’s the way Barry and I came to ALL WEAR BOWLERS on Thursday.
Well, I do remember reading something about Laurel and Hardy, Magritte, and Beckett. I also saw promotional images which showed two very hot men, each usually holding an egg in his open mouth. And to be fair, I admit we had already seen each of these wonderful performers several times before, working with separate companies (Trey Lyford with The Civilians and Geoff Sobelle with the Pig Iron Theatre Company). We knew we weren’t going to miss their collaboration for anything, so I guess we did have a lot of information after all.
Now that I’ve seen it I will say that nothing I’ve read since and none of the images or short clips I’ve seen on line (don’t go to the act’s website – it doesn’t begin to do the piece justice) can prepare anyone for what happens at the HERE Arts Center on lower 6th Avenue.
Like most everyone else in the audience, I laughed out loud throughout more than half of the evening’s single act, and the rest of the time I was really worried about the survival of these two pure souls. Is this what our grandparents (great-grandparents?) experienced before talkies, before the victory of mass entertainment and the near-totally-unconditional surrender of live theatre?
In any event, I’m certain no one has ever seen anything like what these two performers are giving us today.
Their remarkable feat of collaboration has produced an extrordinary and compelling evening of sensitive drama. I admit that since all four members of our party sat in the front row, it would have been hard not to have been affected by what was going on only feet, or even inches, away. But since there were, I think, only four rows behind us, nobody is likely to miss anything.
And they shouldn’t want to, but there are only two more weeks to secure a seat.
ALL WEAR BOWLERS is almost perfectly brilliant.

[image, by Gregory Costanzo, from Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe]

Carter Kustera Boys Will Be Boys 2004 gouache and mixed media on paper 22″ x 30″


Boys Will Be Boys detail

Violence with a flair. In his current show at Lyonsweirgallery Carter Kustera finds a way to seriously address the commercial world’s obsession with glamorizing violence without abandoning his own aesthetic – or his usual good humor.
The show is titled, “Fabulous Anger,” and these provocative works on paper will be up until March 12.
The press release on the gallery site tells us how we can become be an integral part of Kustera’s art and wit. He’s also a really nice guy, which would be pretty relevant to those who can accept this offer:

Carter Kustera will also be featured in -scope New York from March 11th – 14th at Flatotel, 135 West 52nd Street. Kustera’s “America’s Most Wanting” is a body of work gleaned from personal encounters. These intimate works on paper are simple silhouettes that have quips about the sitter. These engaging antidotes utter volumes about the way people project themselves in public and how the public interprets them. Kustera will be available for individual portrait commissions during the run of the scope Art Fair.

Carter Kustera Who’s the Bitch Now? 2005 gouache and mixed media on paper 22″ x 30″


Who’s the Bitch Now? detail

[images from Lyonsweirgallery]

Jenny Scobel Flutter in the Room 2004 graphite, watercolor, oil and wax 32″ x 24″

Friends already know I really like Jenny Scobel’s work, but the current show at Thomas Erben has the best stuff I’ve seen yet. These two may be my favorites. I’ll also admit that the backdrops are so exciting they make me shudder.
This is the first time we’ve seen a male image in her iconography, and the faces are usually anonymous. Scobel’s brother Quentin died of AIDS in 1996.


Jenny Scobel Quent 2004 graphite, oil and wax on prepared wooden panel 32″ x 24″

[images from Thomas Erben Gallery]