The ALNB Artists of Color Show 2 Art Critique

 I visited the Artists of Color Show II today. I commented on the show's existence in an earlier post.

This is a wildly eclectic show and a bit of a mixed bag in terms of quality. Add to this the fact that a few of these artists are friends or well known peers. I will do my best to present an objective set of observations.

Darryl Oates, one of this country's finest portrait artists, judged the show and the task was a difficult one. But the unintended consequence of judging leaves the show short any work he might have contributed and that's a shame.

The show featured many portraits or pictures of individuals or advocacy poster designs. All of the prize winning pieces were portraits of one kind or another.

First prize was awarded to a portrait by Stanwyck Cromwell that didn't click for me - an abstract hodgepodge of colorful silhouettes that was pleasant enough with nothing to say and nowhere to go. On the other hand, his other entry, Give Peace a Chance, I thought was far more artistically interesting because of its aesthetic coupling to artistic practice like Rauschenberg's Combine objects. 

The Cromwell pieces expose a chronic weakness with all messaging or virtue signaling art and that is that the juvenile imagery and utopian lecturing can bring even well crafted and artistically sound art objects into the realm of American Kitsch which is its own ocean of commercially successful but intellectually questionable material.

Many other artists in the show had similar pieces that broke out into 3 dimensional space using assemblage techniques.

The Second Place winning entry was also a messaging piece by illustrator Jaii Mark Renee whose work is available as posters.:

The Third Prize piece, Jo-Sam by Pedro Valentin is the most compelling of the pieces in the Prize winning category. Valentin is a fine artist who is delivering the goods. The Jo-Sam painting makes use of the canvas, negative space, and gestural and expressive emotion to create a truly moving piece. This is a bit of a Black Swan entry in that there's nothing particularly impressive about style, innovative material application, or the usual aesthetic metrics involving painting. This piece just works, damn.

Valentin's second entry, Harriet, is equally impressive. The use of the aura in both pieces has deep historical roots in religious iconography, pointillism, and Benjamin's modernist theories. Here, it just works. The one curiosity that may be co-incidental are Harriet's hands that look a little too much like an AI glitching hallucination - this a minor observation. The just-off-center positioning of the figure also just works despite coming perilously close to a defacto bullseye perspective.

The Honorable Mention is also a damned fine piece of work. Abel by Christopher Baskerville is an incredibly well-crafted drawing and an uncanny piece of artwork. Baskerville's drawing employs Perlstein's figure cropping technique to constrain the attention on the subject. Abel is looking at you and trying to get a better look. The treatment of the ears is sublime - it's the gaze that's important. And look at those eyes - they are super charged - somehow enhanced to really LOOK-AT-YOU. Study the reflections off the eye. Superb.

Here's where the show gets into the ALNB's Black Mirror territory (it simply goes where it goes).

An outstanding picture for your consideration is Desire for Rebirth by Maurice Robinson Somee. I have a soft spot for the German Expressionists and Somee's picture of a woman's apparition is a blast from that past. This is the stuff that going to art shows is all about. It's a piece that pops and  isn't about to get confused as wallpaper. See if you agree.

But Somee's piece is simply a hold-my-beer challenge for Fior Rodriguez whose With Good Intention explores the complex psyche of the individual subject. In full disclosure, I'm becoming a fan of Rodriguez's work, it's strange and exposes video game stacks of questions and riddles. Here, a dream state or cyber state suspension of reality. Her comfort zone is a vacant apartment with a lone picture on an incompletely painted wall. Also, like Valentin, only the useful body parts are illustrated as if Elon Musk's observation that the only important thing about any of us is not the body but the mind.

There is another cohort of artists who are best described as outsider artists. Maurice D. Robertson's contribution to this show, Ocean Beach, is one of the strangest and most inspired photographs I've ever seen him exhibit. Ocean Beach is channeling the late David Lynch here. Robertson who is the ultimate CT arts scene insider is eternally the phantom documentarian of all things happening culturally in New England. An outsider who knows the territory.

The Ocean Beach photograph is different. I mean really different. First, it's a vertical picture of what should be a horizontal landscape scene. And it has an imperceptive quality to the scene - is this real?

The back foot of the boy rushing out of the picture looks as if something from an underworld is attempting to keep him there. Just behind him a white object looking like the top of a skull looks on.

And the horizon line is nothing more than a human wall of nondescript people - people like us but not us. And the sky above them looks mighty unhappy. An ancient Greek looking into those clouds could name you the Gods who are visiting. And is there even one grain of sand that hasn't been moved for human convenience? Something is written on that sand.

Gerald Kilyaw contributed a couple of pieces more along the lines of naive Outsider art. Lumberjacks illustrates an encounter between a black person dressed in perfunctory African colors and some Canadian lumberjacks. One can only guess why that memory is being memorialized here.

The rest of the show featured more material than I can cover in one review. Needless to say there were silkscreen prints, many more portraits, and some wonderful craft items including a carved sitting bench by Ira Halliday.

Check the Art League of New Britain website for further information.