The Poetry of Wood: Alex Garcia and Catherine Mackey
Tint Gallery


In the early twentieth century, with the advent of Cubism and Dadaism, nontraditional materials—that is, vernacular and even perishable materials, usually considered as inherently worthless—began to invade modernist art. The illusionist depiction of reality, mastered over almost five centuries, was superseded by a new vision of art: one more experimental in form and feeling, and more challenging to the viewer, who was asked to interpret collages and constructions made of humble materials lacking the ‘noble’ glamor of bronze, marble and oil paint.

The Poetry of Wood brings together eleven wall-mounted assemblages by Alex Garcia and twelve drawings and paintings by Catherine Mackey. Both San Francisco artists have architectural training and share a contemporary recycle/reuse/repurpose ethic, and each explores wood as motif and material, revealing the hidden poetry of old buildings; they are visual archaeologists or paleontologists.

Mackey juxtaposes her views of weathered barns—some realistic, others more expressionist—with swatches of collaged text from tattered old street posters, imagining their lost glory days; the effect is reminiscent of the words emerging from Cubist and Futurist paintings depicting the sensory overload of modern life (circa 1915).   “Lemmon Canyon-Weathered Grays” and “Pasquetti—Aged Ochres” are oil-on-panel portraits of dilapidated barns,  stable triangular structures despite their missing planks, depicted in elevation view, straight-on and  sideways, from a distance, in the Bernd and Hilla Becher style, but with the bright color accents from the collaged text elements lending a contrasting festive note. More dramatic are the two “Vishi Barn Collapse” works on paper, with their impenetrable gray-brown tangles of beams, posts and planks suggesting shipwreck, explosion, or implosion. More abstract are the colorful squashed buildings in “Beautiful Annihilation” (the creative destruction of the economists) and “Sinking into a Soft Caul of Forgetfulness,” its title adapted from Sylvia Plath’s poem on the onset of sleep and winter, “Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond.”  

Garcia salvages fragments from collapsing ranch buildings in West Marin into elegant, semi-abstract constructions that will live on, sheltered, indoors, in viewers’ imaginations—perhaps accompanied by the reclaimed-wood furniture that the artist has made for twenty years. While some the wall-mounted sculptures retain their original rectangular shapes, though carved by the artist, others suggest pictures and narratives (albeit mysterious, playful ones, as in Klee, Kandinsky and Ernst). “Emancipation” is a small wooden panel to which steel rods have been affixed, suggesting a teepee tripod rising from the black arc of the earth into a vivid deep pink sky; a handful of rungs spanning two of the poles suggests a rickety ladder and a short-lived freedom. “That Tree on the Hill” is a spindly array of metal rods that suggests only the most nominal of trees—or old television aerials. “Tale of a Whale” is an assemblage composed of two weathered boards, one suggesting a stylized whale, and the other a ship (or the whale’s lower jaw), with the pieces connected by metal rods that read as teeth or harpoons in this fish story. “Orbiting the Green Planet” and “Arrival” are evocative small abstract landscapes (made with the assistance of the late Beto Toscano) composed of a various textures and colors of found wood—counterpane countries for tiny denizens.

Mackey’s expressionist architectural views and Garcia’s intuitive, elegant fabrications (in both senses of the word) are complementary, and well paired: a vanishing past and an imaginary future are caught and preserved in, by, and for the evanescent present.

—DEWITT CHENG


Rico Solinas' "You Never Know" at Anglim Trimble Gallery, San Francisco (from 48Hills.org)



Rico Solinas's Paintings Depict Bay Area with Affection and Humor

RICO SOLINAS: You Never Know
Anglim/Trimble Gallery
March 2-April 27, 2024

Rico Solinas, an Oakland artist who lives in the Mission, is the subject of a You Never Know, mini-retrospective at Anglim/Trimble Gallery,. While the hundred or so paintings, treating a number of subjects, fill the gallery, it must be said that even this embarrassment of riches is but a tiny sampling of Solinas’s prodigious oeuvre of hundreds of notebooks and tens of thousands of paintings. As Senior Preparator at the San Francisco Museum of Art, the artist skips lunches and breaks, opting instead to document the generally unseen labors of his art-wrangler colleagues. He has also worked closely with and learned from some of the world-famous artists circulating through SFMOMA. He told an interviewer, “I’ve worked with a lot of artists in this job, and you pick up a lot of good tips. One of them is ‘Paint every day.’ ”

Painting is a synthesis of focused observation—the Surrealist painter Max Ernst claimed his favorite activity was seeing—and painterly improvisation. The wide-ranging subject matter in this show, which covers almost thirty-five years’ practice, reflects Solinas’s interest in daily life—“I paint what I see,” as the mordant cartoonist Gahan Wilson once joked— filtered through an sensibility both respectful and playful.

In the late 1980s, Solinas, then in his middle thirties, began a series of landscape paintings on the unusual substrate of antique handsaws. This was partly a tribute to his recently deceased grandfather, a carpenter whom Solinas’ s artist mother had herself honored by painting on his circular saw blades to make gifts for her children. The handsaw paintings now displayed  throughout the gallery depict trucks, piping, and industrial machinery, in an homage to manual labor—which includes art making. It is easy, in the resurgence of the labor movement in recent years, to see the series as sharing the celebratory spirit of the working-man art of the Depression and early 1940s. Solinas later expanded the series, now containing hundreds of saws, to depict the art museums that he visited (and worked in) in the United States and Europe, including SFMOMA and other Bay Area institutions, in the aptly named series,100 Museums: Paintings of Buildings That Have Paintings Inside.

In 1990, Solinas  painted a series of carefully observed portraits of the naval ships docked at Hunters Point (a WWII Navy base now housing artist studios), setting them in heaving, theatrical seas. The long rectangular paintings on panel , marine typology, resemble the ship paintings adorning boys’ plastic model kits, and their oddly skewed horizon lines, which the installation plays up by installing some of the thirteen works at odd angles, exude a storm-tossed vibe, as if the works had been hung on rotating gimbals, never to spill their contents no matter how buffeted, in true ship shape. Across the gallery hangs Solinas’s 1991 painting, “151Third Street,” depicting the jumbled skyline of the downtown neighborhood that four years later would house the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,. The painted skyline is oddly canted at about 7 degrees to the left, similar to those ubiquitous  photos of San Francisco’s hilly streets with the streets aligned with the bottom of the picture margin and the lined-up houses apparently tilted askew; the gallery has humorously installed the painting tilted so that the buildings look plumb (as we know most of them to be)..

Later in the 1990s, came a series of tondo (circular-format) works depicting windblown trees and commercial signage motifs from our urban infrastructure. Instead of painting from photos, Solinas painted these twenty-four works on-site, with his back to the motifs, working from a convex mirror attached to his easel, providing a wide-angle peephole distortion. This absurdist shoot-over-the-shoulder Annie-Oakley approach, with its resultant backward-reading looking-glass messages, remakes Pop Art motifs from ‘vulgar’ contemporary life with engaging wit and humor.

FInally, in 2020, with the advent of the covid pandemic, Solinas began a series of small plein-air (outdoor) gouache (opaque watercolor) paintings on paper, documenting the street life of the Bayview District, in southeast San Francisco. If the predominantly minority Bayview is regarded with trepidation by the cautious, Solinas’s corrective views of la vie bohémienne, which have gained a wide audience on Instagram and Facebook (where I first saw them), betray neither angst nor indignation over social injustice. The Bayiew’s denizens are carefully observed,, but Solinas eschews photographic realism in favor of cheerful distortion. He depicts not individual people so much as characters in a scene, as if onstage, performing in, say, a music or opera. Again, the depictions of working-class life by sympathetic Depression artists come to mind. Solinas: “A couple figures, a couple buildings… I just want to capture everyday places that people go to.” The Bayview, a book with sixty-seven of these friendly paintings inside, so to speak, has just been published.



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Abstract Paintings by A.L. Woods, 2020-2023, Stanford National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park CA, through March 25, 2024

A.L. WOODS
Recent Abstract Paintings

In the 1950s, the Abstract Expressionist painter Barnett Newman stated, “It was decided just to paint,” declaring the new movement’s rejection of the outworn creeds of realism and representation. Some seventy-five years later, amid the dizzying variety of contemporary art, with performance art , video, installation, computer art, and conceptual art having replaced the traditional manual skills prized by Newman and his peers, the statement could be read quite differently: as a commitment to painting, that millennia-old medium as old as civilization itself  that is periodically declared dead so by upcoming generations.

A.L. Woods is a former engineer and scientist whose painting practice is a dialogue between her materials—water-based acrylic inks and paints on wooden panel—and the humanized geometric vision that she pursues with discipline and purpose. Woods jokes about her labor-intensive process while restating her commitment: “No one wants to copy my work. You’ve got to like you process.” Eighteen of her recent paintings, all but one in her favored square format, are on view at Stanford National Accelerator Laboratory’s Building 52 through March of 2024. Her systematic approach is evident in the numbered titles, suggesting scientific experimentation; but ancillary titles like Undersea, Granite, Lichen, and the quartet of rose-bush paintings —Honor, Freedom, Mr. Lincoln, and Cecile Brunner —demonstrate that the grid format is flexible enough to accommodate real life, like being trapped at home by the pandemic quarantine, surrounded by plants. Picasso once noted that the greens that inundated him at a Versailles garden demanded that he paint them out of his system.

Woods’ abstractions are very different from Picasso’s vehement, prehensile distortions, however. Viewers may be reminded of the geometric razzle-dazzle of 1960s Op Art because of the underlying rhythmic structure, which also suggests the artist’s background in fluid dynamics, but the assertively flat patterns and domineering sizes employed by  Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley, with their flawless, mechanical-looking facture, are a far cry from Woods’ medium-sized handmade artifacts, with the colors modulated and mixed to create shading, space and even pictorial atmosphere. The color and tonal variations in Wood's grid patterns create light- and dark-centered forms that suggest change and variation within a controlled format.

Woods’ preference for mathematically grid-based abstraction reflects her methodical, approach to artmaking, perhaps  shaped by her decades of making fiber art (which included weaving audiocassette tapes) and her enjoyment of the visual paradoxes of M.C. Escher, like the lizards in Reptiles (1943) endlessly marching from printed-book 2D space into the viewer’s 3D space and back again. I am reminded as well of Josef Albers’ Despite Straight Lines prints, depicting geometric shapes seen in axonometric perspective, that resemble engineering drawings of irrational optical illusions. (Albers’ Stanford Wall, 1974-7, featuring some of these designs, stands on Roth Way just east of the Oval.) The methodical approach applies not just to the careful painting of her orthogonal grids—which combine the two-dimensional perfect forms of equilateral triangles and hexagons with diamond shapes that read as squares, seen in perspective—but also to her color mixing, which must be done flawlessly, with no retouching or correction. Woods found her color-mixing methodology, with the source colors placed at the corners of a square, and carefully mixed in the intermediary blanks, in the writings of the Bauhaus color theorist Joannes Itten; the idea of using a triangular grid for mixing instead of a square derives from the contemporary New York painter Sanford Wurmfeld.

The British painter David Hockney once postulated that the more time a painting took to make, the better it would be. (He was doing photo-mosaics at the time, which take 50 or 100 shutter clicks, and negligible time, so the math is still on the side of painting.) Viewers of Woods’ meditative mazes will find the the slow, accretive richness of these carefully wrought paintings to be infinite and inexhaustible.