ArtOpticon.us

Recent developments in digital photography have made possible (and absurdly easy) what was once impossible and unthinkable: dozens of shots per second, shooting in near-darkness, and even video, captured before the shutter is actually pressed. Such superpowers may speed up a professional’s “work flow” (as if cameras were an assembly line)), but what tech giveth, it also taketh away. Pressing the button and letting the machine do the rest (as early Kodak ads boasted) destroys the mystique of great photographs, reducing hard-won aesthetic achievement to choosing the best of hundreds of ‘spray-and-pray” random slices of the spatiotemporal pie. Artificial Intelligence, with its slick rendering of imaginary scenarios created with verbal prompts, completely ignores the dedication, skill, and experience required for capturing the decisive moment with light and film.

There is a reaction against the mechanization of vision, however. Younger photographers are choosing relatively low-tech older cameras that yield a recognizably ‘imperfect’ filmic look, less sharply focused, and otherwise violating digital dogma. It reflects as well a desire to escape the relentlessness of online life. Photography, slowed down to a walk, restores the experience of  observing reality, not glowing pixels.

The intimate, poetic photographs of Kayhan Jafar-Shaghaghi, an Iranian scholar with degrees in in history, business, and economics, now living in Edinburgh, epitomize this rejection of the move-fast-and-shoot-things FOMO (fear of missing out) photographic ethos. Kayhan’s large-format still life photos are made with an 8x10 view camera of the kind preferred by his idols Ansel Adams—whose work galvanized the young artist—and Irving Penn, recently shown at the de Young Museum. The exquisitely rendered tone and color, considered by photographers both painterly and cinematic, suggest Kayhan’s roots in modernist photography, but their resonances go even further back into art history to the symbolic, allegorical still-life painting of the 17th century. The Dutch Masters rendered their still-life subjects immaculately, celebrating the brief, glorious beauty of flowers, but also propagating the then-dominant Christian faith in memento mori: visual sermons.  We viewers are just passing through time, as the flowers and foodstuffs are. The inner life that we discern in Kayhan’s mysterious objects echoes our own subjective experience as sentient transients.

The gallery’s press release states, “Each image [in Poise] captures a state of suspended animation—a delicate tension before movement, transformation, or dissolution. Crafted through slow, intuitive methods, these photographs… bear witness to the uncertain equilibrium of our collective condition, speaking to the fragility and strength of that which endures.” Kayhan’s fascination with the intricacies of film and paper, including a decade of experimentation with the extremely difficult process of printing black and white Cibachrome on IMAGO paper, testifies to his interest in historyy; his fidelity to the medium, with its aesthetic and technical strengths and weaknesses (by today’s standards); and his commitment to his subjects, household objects of scant intrinsic interest that gain force and presence from the artist’s vivifying focus.

“Poise” (2022), for which the show takes its name, suggests liminality, or a threshold state combining both the opposites of balance and positional readiness. One of a series of works,  including “Yield,” “Suspend” “Displace,” “Release,” and “Rest,” this image, which has an archaic, early-photography look, assembles wooden blocks borrowed from a neighbor into various stacked configurations that suggest a human figure, simplified through Cubist eyes—an unmade work of art history interpolated into the present. Kayhan, by the way, favors the local, citing in a recent gallery interview (available on the gallery website) the assemblage sculptor Joseph Cornell, whose rambles around his Utopia Parkway home in Queens yielded all the materials to populate his dream universe. Speaking of dreams, Kayhan’s color print, “Vessel” (2023), leans toward surrealism, with its depiction of a blue ceramic pot into which a bird, perhaps a chicken, appears to be burrowing, fleeing predators, but perhaps ending up as chicken-in-every-pot human fodder: soup id good food, Another color print, “Balance (2024),” presents a floral arrangement in which the red, yellow, pink and white roses incline in all directions, suggesting both wilting and the daily heliotropic struggle for light and life. The most memorably strange work is “Adrift Also (Octopus on Plinth) (2022),” with its tentacled cephalopod protagonist, probably another neighborly borrowing (like the frozen snake in another photo not shown here), decorously draped over a sculpture pedestal as if posing for its portrait.

Years ago, the art historian Suzi Gablik, championed what she termed a “re-enchantment of art” from what she saw as meaningless formal experimentation— the aesthetic dogma of the day. Kayhan, whose cultural roots date from the ancient Persian art he saw in museums as a child, has a longer historical view than that prevalent in our algorithm-driven Anthropocene age. Kayhan: “I’m more of a scavenger….. I respond to what I find. I try to be not that selective about whether I reject something or not.”

TIME & TIDE: THE Art of John Wehrle
Richmond Art Center

This massive Richmond Art Center (RAC) retrospective of the Richmond, California, muralist John Wehrle has been a long time coming, but is certainly well deserved. In his long career, Wehrle has produced murals that have becoming iconic to the East Bay city, north of Berkeley, as well championed art in the region, sometimes surprisingly; as a onetime Board member, he volunteered to design and fabricate the reception desk still in use at RAC, (which has a long history as a civic arts nonprofit, punching way above its modest budget).

Time & Tide, guest-curated by RAC former Gallery Director and Executive Director Jeff Nathanson, features scores of artworks in various media:18 paintings,14 digital reproductions of murals, 19 preparatory drawings and maquettes, 14 painted wood sculptures, and a dozen or so works in photography, both analog and digital. There is a beautifully produced catalog as well.

Wehrle’s peripatetic art career began in rural Texas. A non-athlete by his own wry admission, the tall, affable Wehrle discovered his artistic superpower copying, with a friend, WW2 fighter planes from Flying magazine: Corsairs, Lightnings, Spitfires, Mustangs, and Marauders. At college at Texas Tech, in Lubbock, he majored in art and drew cartoons for the school newspaper while participating, at his father's insistence, in the Reserve Office Training Program. In 1966, during his military service, Lieutenant Wehrle  became the leader of the first of three combat artist teams documenting the war. Wehrle: “I was basically trying not to get the team in fire fights. The paintbrush doesn’t make a very good weapon.” The paintings that the artists made late from field sketches were exhibited in Art of the American Soldier at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. They are represented here by digital reproductions.

After studying art at Pratt Institute, which regularly sent its grads to art teaching jobs in the Midwest, Wehrle moved to San Francisco, teaching at the de Young Museum’s Education program and at California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC, now CCA). A few years later, in 1973, the restless artist left academia for a back-to-the-land experiment in cabin-building in Montana, overwintering there alone while living in a VW camper. The Thoreauvian adventure became the subject of a 12-photo book, Whiskey Gulch, and the prolonged solitude amid the frozen woods became a formative experience. Returned to the comparatively comfortable Bay, Wehrle worked as a baker and carpenter, eventually lured back to the art world by a de Young colleague who invaded the bakery and pointed him toward the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, a kind of successor to the 1930s Works Progress Administration: artists were paid by the government to make public art. Sadly, such programs are vulnerable to the vagaries of political weather: the WPA ended with American entry into WWII; CETA, Wehrle notes, transitioned into training security guards.

But mural painting proved a perfect fit for Wehrle, who enjoyed the public performance aspect of working on a scaffold as well as researching the contexts and histories of public spaces. He found that he could express his curious, playful, and gently ironic temperament. Wehrle’s murals portray all the inhabitants of an area, past and present, as interacting characters in a transtemporal saga: a kind of James Michener chronicle of place condensed into a single moment. Ohlone people, in Berkeley, at the Amtrak station? Vaqueros and grizzlies at a gas station on San Pablo Avenue? Yes, of course. Wehrle, on painting the war rather than photographing it: “But a photograph is like a moment, whereas with a painting, you can put a lot of moments together.” Time & Tide, which proverbially wait for no man, is thus a fitting title for this show, with its lighthearted, colorful chronological revisionism, and low-key environmentalism that celebrate the regional, but elevate it, and into a larger, more expansive Our Town view of life.

Positively Fourth Street, the mural that Wehrle and John Rampley painted fifty years ago on the side of the de Young parking lot, in Golden Gate Park, introduces a theme recurrent in many of the later paintings, drawings, and sculptures, some commissioned and some made independently. The ambiguous relationship between the human and animal worlds, between culture and nature, is expressed here in a view of San Francisco’s eastbound freeway ramp approaching the Bay Bridge, with the Fourth Street signage dangling precariously, cars emptied of drivers and passengers, and the infrastructure reclaimed by bears, a turkey, a bison, a swan, deer, a wild dog, a wolf, a hawk, a pelican, and a pronghorn sheep. The skyline buildings (sparse by current standards after decades of Manhattanization) stand mute guard. Post-apocalyptic narratives have become a staple of mass entertainment in the decades since, and we have become inured to the idea of human extinction: it’s just a movie; someone will save us! It is presented here, matter-of-factly, in an understated manner, without overt polemics. Wehrle:

With the onset of melting ice caps, one begins to speculate on a future resembling the past…. Nature is a powerful force and wants to reclaim its own. Weeds push through the sidewalk cracks, ice crumbles walls, water rises. Time changes everything….

A pendant to the Fourth Street mural is the more recent mural-sized panoramic painting , “Rising Tide,” begun in 2011 for a one-month Artist Residency at the de Young; stored, not quite finished; then exhibited at the Richmond Art Center years later, and completed; and again rolled up and stored. It reprises the narrative of ecological collapse, but less apocalyptically. The junction of Columbus Avenue, Washington and Montgomery Streets  in San Francisco’s North Beach is the scene, with the Transamerica Pyramid and the Beaux-Arts Sentinel (aka Zoetrope) Building at stage rear. No mysterious extinction seems to have taken place here, however. People go about their business normally despite the obstacles of knee-deep waters and icebergs emerging from side streets, like glaciers flowing down crevasses. A couple, perhaps tourists, walks and talks on cell phones; a young man hooks a fish; a boatman rows a painting —we see only the black back of the canvas—to safety; a pelican, some penguins, and a flock of Canada geese search for new homes in the new landscape. A lamppost banner advertises “Noye’s Fludd,” the title of a 1958 opera by Benjamin Britten, based on an early fifteenth-century mystery or miracle play about biblical disaster, featuring in its cast, “the voice of God” and a “children’s chorus of animals and birds.” Perhaps some local museum could give this work, so ironic a reminder of possible things to come, and so wonderfully rendered, a permanent-ish prelapsarian place of honor.

Aside from the breadth of Wehrle’s historical research and his artistic virtuosity, arranging multiple source images with their varying viewpoints plausibly (see his perspective-gridded preparatory sketches), the wit and humor that inform his 2D work, but particularly his painted wooden sculptures, is completely contemporary, and could be described without undue parochial pride as northern Californian, both corny and clever; think of the comic philosophers or philosopher-comics of the Dude-Ranch Dada (in the words of one New York critic) École de Davis: William T. Wiley, Robert Arneson, Roy DeForest, and Bruce Nauman, et al. TroutInHand, Wehrle’s symbolic alter ego (for which his website is named), was inspired by the photo of a fish caught in Montana, held by a friend: “A trout in the hand is worth two in the brook.” For his 1968 photo book, The Laws of Scale, Wehrle fabricated a small school of stuffed trouts—silkscreened images sewn onto fabric soft sculptures—and photographed them in different locations, like the traveling garden gnome in Amélie: á la Magritte, raining; in clouds; lying on a desert floor..

The schism between nature and culture takes sculptural form in the juxtaposition of animal or human protagonists and confining geometric structures in the form of boxes, especially the old-fashioned cubic cabinets that housed cathode-ray tube sets during Baby-Boomer childhoods.  In “Fact/Fiction,” a claw-footed Chippendale coffee table painted grass green is carved with the two words, rendered in different colors and fonts. Bisecting the table into bipedal halves is a sawfish, decisively separating the irreconcilables. In “Clamped,” a trout struggles against a woodworker’s clamp. while in “Nesting Instinct,” a mother heron brings her chick, just breaking free of its TV shell, a succulent morsel of cable.The three-dimensional talking head in the ”Fox News” television set blathers on, interminably, his circular logic manifest in a coil of twanging bedspring, while an array of nine TV sets, stacked three on three like Hollywood Squares celebrities, or sets for sale in a big-box store, present multiple versions of two images, distorted by disjunctures—adjust those rabbit ears!—, cleverly rendered by the artist-carpenter: a housewife joyfully extolling her detergent, and the famous Eddie Adams Pulitzer-Prize photo of the pistol execution of a Viet Cong prisoner of war. Thus ever to our satanic enemies (and future cheap labor)! In “Kafka Dream,” the confining rectangle is a framed excerpt of Boschian hellscape from which a tree branch protrudes, bearing a crow or jackdaw (kavka, in Czech) holding in its beak, like nest-building bric-a-brac, cutout letters spelling the author’s name: a curious but apt literary monument.

For the sake of this short review, I have focused on only a fraction of Wehrle’s prodigious output. When you see the show, don’t miss the experiments with digital photography: microscopically detailed composite shots of street signage (“BUMP,” “STOP”); his motion studies of ballet dancer Muriel Maffre (“Muriel 2”), reminiscent of the nineteenth-century multiple-exposure images by Muybridge and Marey; and the composite photo of the underside of the Golden Gate Bridge, cut into the shape of a diving whale’s tail (“Li’l Egypt”). A modestly-sized realistic panorama painting of a golden brown California landscape with a lake flanked by a row of trees and a fence bears the title, “Et in Arcadia Ego,” or, I, Too, was in [the legendary paradise of] Arcadia, after Poussin’s famous elegiac 1638 painting, which has been interpreted as art or memory confronting and transcending mortality—time and tide, that is, for present company.

CARA BARER and PIERO SPADARO: Destination
Andrea Schwartz Gallery

The conceptual photographs of Cara Barer and the abstract paintings of Piero Spadaro in the two-person show at Andrea Schwarz Gallery, Destination, make for a study in apparent contrasts as well as a marriage of complementaries: opposites attract, after all. The old aesthetic concept of art as a finished, polished object of contemplation, a destination, so to speak, resurfaces in these authoritative paintings and photographs; but also operant is the contemporary concept of art as the by-product or end result of a process: as the residuum/evidence of an experiment, unplanned or planned only in general terms. Both artists have shown for years at the gallery; this is,the first time that have exhibited together.

Cara Barer sees her artistic repurposing of old books  as lending them a second life (as objects of art) that will survive the obsolescence of the information they contain (e.g., a Windows 95 manual), an which justify their existence in the world of useful objects. Much of this information, due to the artist’s dissections and reassemblies, including soakings in dye baths, is illegible anyway. Her photographic arrangements of rumpled pages suggest floral (or marine invertebrate) blooms. To some viewers, they might transcend  biological and botanical metaphors to suggest religious icons or mandalas, and, with their radiant colors set against black backgrounds, stained-glass rose windows in Gothic cathedrals: paradoxically weathered symbols of the eternal and ineffable. Barer’s new photographs, mounted to plexiglas, and available in various sizes, focus on maps and travel books, which embody “exploration and impermanence.” The geographic and historical associations of place names that remain still legible in “San Francisco,” “ Altiplano,” “Tierra del Fuego,” and the sardonically entitled “Carving Up the World,” referring to the Great Powers’ colonial adventures of past and present, lend these abstractions an elegiac note: the blue planet floating in blackness, an accordion-folded pressed flower.

If Barer finds poetry and a strange majesty in printed ephemera, Piero Spadaro constructs semi-abstract assemblages that conjure up Romantic landscapes that invoke the Age of Exploration, minus its contemporary sociopolitical black eye. Imagine if polar and tropical expeditions had enlisted abstract painters instead of water-colorists and glass-plate photographers. Spadaro is able to combine the most heterogeneous materials—acrylic, glitter, colored and textured art papers, powdered pigments, including ultraviolet-sensitive colors, and hard, clear resin—into, in his words, “topographical maps that flow over the panels’ surfaces.” His fascination with reflective materials—glitter and, to an extent the resin in which he seals his landscapes, like small animals in amber—is verbally reinforced by his marine-mystique titles. \ “Gleaming,” “Charting,” “Glint,” and “Green Flash,” named after an optical phenomenon occurring at sunrise and sunset during specific atmospheric conditions, connect scientific exploration and observation with—is it safe to revive this term?—the pursuit of the Absolute.

The double readings of these paintings—between painterly collage/abstraction and visionary landscape—make them infinite; we look both at them and into them, as we peruse Monet’s water lilies.

Destination continues through May 8 at Andrea Schwartz Gallery, 545 4th Street, San Francisco: as gallery.com.

Samantha Fields, "Portents" by DeWitt Cheng

Samantha Fields, “The Path of Totality,” 2024, acrylic on canvas, 41 x 27”. All images courtesy of Traywick Gallery, Berkeley.

Samantha Fields’ exhibition of recent paintings, “Portents,” with their multiple layers of airbrushed pigment, focuses on the skies of Fields’ Los Angeles as their “chief organ of sentiment.” In the 21st century this organ is one brought about by natural forces subject to physical laws, not the judgments of celestial overseers. Even without God in his heaven, however, the skies retain their fascination and awe. Fields has returned to the skies — and their associated clouds, fog, celestial bodies, fires, and fireworks — after a transitional period of domestic interiors realized during the pandemic lockdown.  “Portents” includes eleven medium-sized to small paintings, all derived from “failed photographs,” i.e., flawed snapshots, replete with photographic ‘mistakes,’ like lens flares, but adapted and perfected during the artist’s lengthy painting process. All are beautiful and mysterious, all imply something that is not yet evident, the promise of a withheld or ambiguous revelation, as Jorge Luis Borges put it. In the aftermath of the recent wildfires, a subject that the artist has explored before, it is easy to interpret the paintings secularly as environmental warnings to Angelenos to get our minds right about rebuilding in the naturally fire-prone Southern California ecosystem, especially given our poisoned political culture.   The gallery notes that “Portents” evokes a fractured world that may be slipping away — a reality that is constantly in flux and just out of reach. “Fields,” they assert, “uses the metaphor of celestial phenomena, such as a total solar eclipse, to articulate this elusive feeling.” The transient phenomena of the natural world are thus caught and preserved in paintings that freeze and condense time for our leisurely contemplation. “Portent,” the show’s eponymous painting, depicts a dust storm or tornado as seen from afar, darkly foreboding swirling masses of muted color that evoke recent natural twister disasters in the American south.

Samantha Fields, “Whole Sky,” 2024, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24”.

Samantha Fields, “Portent,” 2024, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24”.

Samantha Fields, “The World is Not as You See It,” 2024, acrylic on canvas, 34 x 28”.

Samantha Fields, “Cathedral,” 2024, acrylic on canvas, 12 x 9”.

PATRICK HUGHES: The Newest Perspective
Scott Richards Contemporary Art

Students of art history may remember that the discovery of perspective was crucial  to the development of realist painting in the Renaissance, and was deemed almost miraculous. The Florentine painter, Paolo Uccello, lost himself in ecstasies over the geometry of space, exclaiming from his studio, late at night (according to his long-suffering wife) “Che bella cosa e la perspettiva!”

It is easy to imagine the English painter Patrick Hughes similarly obsessed and delighted over the constructed painting/sculpture hybrids that he has made for most of his six-decade career, eye-fooling depictions of buildings and objects—both Renaissance palazzi and contemporary art and art books—that use perspective devices and illusions to comment wittily on art and artists, representation and reality. The distorted anamorphic skull in Holbein’s “The Ambassadors,” visible only obliquely from a position to the left of and below the painting, from the stairway where it was originally hung, is a famous example. So are the theatrical forced-perspective cityscapes of columns and arcades by Palladio and Borromini in Vicenza and Rome, respectively.

Hughes was one of several young English artists in the 1960s who were attracted to Surrealism’s spirit of freedom, though not to its Romantic doom and gloom. The absurdist humor of Ionesco and Magritte—his favorite painter, according to the title of one painting—led Hughes from literature into art, at a teacher’s suggestion. An early Magrittean painting, “Brick and Sky” (1965) depicts a blue sky with a few wispy clouds, punctured by a jagged hole; just below the shattered sheetrock crater lies a brick wall, as if a house had capsized. A 1964 work, “Sticking-Out Room,” depicts a room, emptied of furnishings, that might have housed one of Magritte’s giant apples or roses; with its vanishing point located squarely at the center of the panel, it resembles a stage set, or a Flemish Madonna’s bedroom, but the receding side walls, ceiling and flow are all painted on planes that slope down toward the edges instead of upward like the sides of a box, as we optically interpret them. The depiction of receding planes on protruding ones—i.e., the contradiction between the conceptual and the perceptual—is the operant principle of Hughes’ ‘reverspective’ work since 1989, when he returned to space-bending illusionism. Hughes: I knew nothing about perspective… I was a fool who rushed in where angels fear to tread.”

Thirteen of Hughes’ 2023-4 trompe-l’oeil/trompe-l’esprit works, both eye-fooling and mind-bending, comprise The New Perspective, and represent the artist’s playfully Heraclitean philosophy that everything changes. As the viewer slightly changes his position the classic-architecture buildings and objects (mostly stacks of books and artworks) with their hints of di Chrico expand or contract in a fascinating but slightly unnerving manner; move to far to the left or right, and entire portions of the subjects vanish, and other shapes spring up, like Holbein’s symbolic skull.

Also on view are Hughes’ cutout paintings on shaped board (a format which the artist explored as an undergraduate) of stacks of books and sculptures and various artifacts that may suggest the realistic but humorous Funk sculptures of Bay Area ceramists. “Books” and “Illhughesion” present floating images of art books, including Hughes’s own Paradoxymoron, testifying to the artist’s researches in art, aesthetics and perception. “Brillo Pile” takes as its subject the famous Andy Warhol painted sculpture from the 1960s that raised so many questions about reality and representation, questions that remain definitively unanswered to this day—and will probably remain so.

Patrick Hughes has written, “Reverspectives give you air to breathe and a dance of life to pursue.” They absolutely must be seen in real, ‘breathing’ space, and brought to life by the viewer; reproductions alone, even the ‘animated’ videos that the gallery helpfully provides online, cannot capture their light-hearted and compelling magic.