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.
