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.

Twenty-one mixed-media (acrylic and laser cutting on wood) paintings by San Francisco artist Richard Bolingbroke that combine scientific and visionary realms. SNAL (formerly SLAC) is not open to the public except during receptions (TBA). Through March 30, 2025.

Seventeen oil paintings by the San Francisco artist Anne Subercaseaux from her "Architectural," "Reflections," and "La Nature" series, frozen-moment meditations on the built and natural environment. Through March 27. The Stanford University Faculty Club, 439 Lagunita Drive, is open to the public on weekdays during business hours.

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.

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.

Amazing show documenting the  industrial architecture of the 20th and late 19th century in Europe and US. The Beckers' architectural archaeology was embraced by Minimalists and Conceptualists, but stands on its own as extremely skilful and thorough documentation of a lost world never previously considered aesthetically. I was introduced to their work by Sol Lewitt's piece in Artforum (?) back in the 60s or 70s. Today I was particularly taken with the Pennsylvania "tipple" mineheads, shot between 1974 and 1978, ramshackle scaffoldings constructed ad hoc, as needed—"Form genom funktion"—by small groups of independent coal miners. Catalogue available. Show ends April 2!

AMALIA MESA-BAINS
Archaeology of Memory, Berkeley Art Museum
Emblems of the Decade: Borders,  Rena Bransten Gallery

The Trumpian Confederacy may be censoring actual, factual history (AKA Biden-Marxist fake news), but the socially liberal art world has embraced the populist, multiracial history of the United States.

One of the pre-eminent artists involved in this paradigm shift is the Bay Area’s Amalia Mesa-Bains, who has championed Mexican identity and culture since the 1970s. and is the subject of a major retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum and a related show—an installation and a set of digital collages on canvas— at San Francisco’s Rena Bransten Gallery. These shows follow a suite of recent museum retrospectives by a quintet of distinguished artists of color: all with ties to the Bay Area: Ruth Asawa, Bernice Bing, Dewey Crumpler, Carlos Villa, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Mesa-Bains, an author, educator, and curator as well as an artist, works in a variety of forms, butt is best known for her multimedia installations. These theatrical assemblage environments  conjoin old glamor photographs, postcards, toys, figurines, vintage furniture, shells, ceramic fragments, candles, crystals, mirrors, pearls, broken glass, draperies, gold leaf, dried leaves, rocks, sand, dried flower petals, branches and soil. ‘Voice-over’ quotations are inscribed over the imagery in collages, and in her installations, on the wall, or handwritten in the scattered materials on the floor.

These bricolage shrines to the dead—which commemorate strong-willed culture heroines like the seventeenth -century scholar-nun Sor Inès de la Cruz and the actress Dolores Del Rio—draw on the Mexican tradition of the ofrenda, a home altar created during the Day of the Dead to welcome the visiting souls of deceased family members. Photos of the dead honoree are displayed on the wall surrounded by crucifixes and images of the saints and the Virgin Mary; below, the ancestors’ favorite foods and drinks, along with candles, mirrors and yellow marigolds (cempazuchitl, a flower the Aztecs associated with death) complete the offerings. The Berkeley retrospective features almost sixty works from Mesa-Bains’ long career, including ofrenda along with shrines, altars, codices, and digital-collage prints. The wealth of information may seem daunting, but the artist’s homages are poetic and associational rather than literal and historic. I was particularly taken with the ghostly imagery that seems buried within the antique mirrors; the effect is achieved by abrading the silvering behind the glass surface and fixing the image of the saint or scholar in question so as to appear floating within the vaporous aperture: historical memory confronts the viewer like an apparition.

Mesa-Bains’ profusely decorated shrine installations center on items of antique furniture reflecting the artist’s studies of history, religion, culture, identity, and myth, which merge and collide, illuminating the conditions of the present.

A woman’s vanity or dressing table is the central focus of the anti-Freudian Venus Envy, Chapter I: First Holy Communion, Moments Before the End. In this examination of the virginal role model traditionally inculcated in adolescent Latinas. Surmounted by boudoir cloud of white satin ruching, the white table supports a clutter of artificial pearls, frame photos of young women, perfume bottles and Madonnas, with a suggestive seashell on the floor, but intimations of mortality intrude: a gold and silver skull peep from the half-opened drawers, and revealed in the mirror is the fearsome Aztec goddess Coatlicue, one of whose aspects, Cihuacōātl, "snake woman,” is associated with deaths in childbirth.

Sexual purity is again the subject in The Virgin’s Garden, featuring a hand-painted, moss-bedecked armoire or wardrobe, its half-open door revealing clothing and books inside. Inspired by a fifteenth-century German Renaissance painting, a copy of which is displayed nearby, the piece examines the hortus conclusus, or closed garden, the traditional emblem of female chastity—and especially of the Immaculate Conception— dating from the Song of Solomon: Hortus conclusus soror mea, sponsa, hortus conclusus, fons signatus. A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up…. Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.

The liberating education of the female mind during eras of male repression is the subject of The Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The seventeenth-century colonial-era Mexican nun and intellectual, who had educated herself in her own library, which came to include four thousand books, hosted a salon in her nunnery of  for other learned women; wrote poetry and prose in Latin and Nahuatl on religion, love, feminism and the misogyny and hypocrisy of the dominant male order in a  “philosophical satire” entitled Hombres Necios, Foolish Men; and was punished, predictably, for her transgressions by being forced to sell her beloved library and return to traditional duties, dying in 1695 at the age of forty-seven, of plague while tending to her Hieronymite Order sisters. (Octavio Paz postulates that entering a nunnery was the best option available for ambitious, independent women at that time.) Sor Inés’ imagined work table, adorned with books, lamps, musical scores, and manuscripts, is flanked by a small stand being an Aztec figurine, an oil painting of a bespectacled inquisitorial grandee; and a heavy leather-upholstered chair lighted by large candlesticks, all painted gold. Stands of hair lie on the seat of the chair, suggesting the punitive shearing of tresses, or even the pulling out of hair in despair. (A twin of this chair appears, in silver, in the artist’s show on the US-Mexico border at Rena Bransten.) In the mirror above the desk Sor Inés appear, among her books, beneath a radiating pattern of fracture lines in the glass. These cracks were due to an art mishandling error, but the artist, perhaps remembering Duchamp’s embrace of accident in the Large Glass, liked them for their suggestion of a radiant intelligence, albeit one silenced by social duress.

This short article provides only a small sample of Mesa-Bains’ work, which also includes codices and digital collages addressing, among other things, the friction at the US-Mexico border (also in the San Francisco gallery show) and the artist’s recovery from a serious car accident through traditional curandera treatments. Two large sculptures, however, require mention. Cihuateotl with Mirror in Private Landscapes and Public Territories depicts Mother Earth as a voluptuously curvy woman, perhaps a sister to those zaftig Neolithic Venuses, but here covered in moss inscribed with Aztec glyphs for fertility, reclining on a carpet of verdure, admiring herself in a large, ornate hand mirror. It’s an environmentalist/feminist take, of course, with perhaps a poke at property-as-theft rights, of traditional love goddesses inspecting themselves, with the pre-eminent version being Velásquez’s Rokeby Venus. A specific landscape, that of the Rio Grande,  is the impetus behind What the River Gave to Me, the title of which must surely allude to Frida Kahlo’s elegiac 1939 painting, What the Water Gave Me. Mesa-Bains’s large sculpture reconstructs the river demarcating the border between the United States and Mexico as a luminous channel cutting through mountainous terrain carrying irregularly blue glass globes or bubbles, each bearing the name of a person who completed the perilous crossing, an illegal or undocumented alien now, but perhaps someday one of the “job creators” that we so fervently revere.

Her images on the paper appear in a space that is undefined evoking a sense of mystery that invites the viewer to linger trying to discern what's beyond the edges. In Place 6, a solitary rower is centered on the paper in such a way that you think you can hear the quiet gentle rhythm of the oars in the water. One wonders is the background clouds or trees on the shore? Where has the individual come from and where they are going? Are there others?

Inspiration is taken from photographic collections in books and online archives, with figures and transportation conveyances seemingly from another time and a place that once was, though the artist has noted that recent works are motivated by stories of recent war, trauma migration and loss.

Gale Antokal was born in New York, New York, and received her BFA (1980) and MFA from the California College of the Arts in 1984. In 1992 Antokal received a Visual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a Professor Emeritus at San Jose State University in the Department of Art and Art History. Antokal held several visiting artist positions and teaching positions including the San Francisco Art Institute, Instructor of Art History at the Lehrhaus Institute, and the American College in Jerusalem. She was an affiliate faculty member in the JSSItaly program in Civita Castellana, Italy in 2015.

Duane Michals: The Portraitist
Crocker Art Museum

It’s an era of celebrity worship—and, with Instagram selfies, of democratic self-aggrandizement—so the timing of this large exhibition of Duane Michals’ photographic portraits of our cultural royalty, with a few commoner friends and relatives thrown in, could not be better timed. “Portraits,” curated by Linda Benedict-Jones, and presented by Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions, features more than 125 photos—“recently discovered by the artist in his New York apartment,” according to the museum press materials.  Old and young familiar faces—musicians, actors and actresses, artists, writers— appear, but seen in unfamiliar ways: personally, and idiosyncratically interpreted.

Michals, a self-taught photographer, has had a long career photographing for publications, but came to art-world notice in the early 1970s with Sequences, a book of narrative sequences of staged/posed photos that married age-old themes—youth, love, loss, old age, death, transfiguration—with the spare, cool, minimalist aesthetic of that period. These multi-shot mini-stories might be stills from a movie made conjointly by Michelangelo Antonioni and Wim Wenders, preceding by two decades CIndy Sherman’s famous fake-film stills. Influenced by writers as well as artists, including Balthus, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Eakins, René Magritte (whose memorable multi-exposure portraits are on view), and Walt Whitman, Michals, who, born in 1932, and an exact contemporary of Andy Warhol (whose portraits are also included) balked at the limitations and superficiality of ‘pure’ photography. (Warhol famously embraced superficiality.) He defiled the sanctity of the pristine photographic objet-d’art by jotting ironic or even at times elegiac inscriptions about the subjects on the prints in a distinctive spidery, ultra-thin handwriting. Michals: “My writing grew out of my frustration with photography. If I took a picture of you ... it would tell me nothing of you as a person.... Sixty percent of my work is photography and the rest is writing.” Like some other celebrated photographers (e.g., Walker Evans, and Andre Kertesz, who appears in Michals’ homage to Hockney), he ventured beyond photography into painting as well, repurposing old tintypes with geometric motifs in oil paint.

It’s extremely difficult to sum up a six-decade career in a few hundred words, but certain themes are present throughout the portraits, which are, like good portrait paintings. as much about the artist as the subject: a respect for individuality; a recognition that life is transient, yet miraculous; and a delight, sometimes whimsical, sometimes ironic, in the power of the imagination and the ambiguities of reality—hence his interest in creative personalities. Michals writes of his subject, the Romanian absurdist playwright, Eugene Ionesco: “Always hovering over his writing is the melancholy of our essential loneliness, and yet he found ways of illuminating this through a filter of humor and satire.” This might be Michals’ credo as well. He annotates another ‘imaginary’ portrait with these octogenarian words of wisdom:

I’m a miracle. We’re walking, talking miracles. You probably gave to be on your death-bed to realize that you’re a miracle, just when it’s too late. But it’s possible to know now, saints know now. If there’s some way that we could understand that being alive is not simply a matter of consuming things and using deodorants. It really is a matter of being a walking, talking, once-in-a-lifetime offer in the universe that’s never going to happen again.

Some noteworthy ‘straight’ portraits—aside from shots of Meryl Streep and Barbara Streisand at the beginnings of their careers—are Veronica Lake, past her glamor-girl peekaboo era in the 1940s, in middle age, laughing at a hotel restaurant where she once worked, while a customer seated behind her booth reacts in surprise; Toshiro Mifune, standing beneath a leafy park canopy of foliage, caught talking, and rather less superhuman than usual, by Michals’ shutter; and a young Carol Burnett, demonstrating the extreme flexibility of her “Freaky Fingers.” Michals examines the human condition in “Self-Portrait as if I Were Dead,” a double-exposure shot of the artist contemplating, with equanimity, his sheeted body on a morgue gurney; and affecionate portraits of departed friends and lovers. Michals’ enjoyment of mirrors, reflections and the theater of self-presentation shines forth in his five-photo sequence of Tilda Swinton as Sibyl, as she progressively removing the veils covering her face; Swinton again, in the Magrittean “Mr. Backwards Forwards,” as an “androgynous phantom” in a man’s suit who rotates her head 180 degrees to look into a handheld mirror, from which she regards us indirectly, like Perseus avoiding Medusa’s gaze; the film director François Truffaut, standing in a darkened hotel room, silhouetted against the window, reflected in two mirrors on adjacent walls; Ludmila Tcherina, the ‘older’ ballerina, Irina, in the 1948 film classic, The Red Shoes, peering at us from a handheld mirror against a rain-streaked view of Paris; a triple view of the artist Ray Johnson and his storefront reflections; Joseph Cornell, reduced by the camera to a Giacomettian wraith;  the author Joan Didion, her features seen through openings in a sheet of cut paper (or is it a photographed photograph?), with her face framed by the shadow of her head and shoulders. Notable for their good-natured kidding are: two images of Chuck Close, seen up close and from afar; two photos, shot years apart, of Sting resembling a young Danny Kaye, and Danny Kaye, an old Sting; and René and Georgette Magritte, holding hands, the clasp unseen behind a tree trunk. Susan Sontag, also photographed here, as a young prodigy, wrote, “All photographs are memento mori,” but some achieve the status of immortal “privileged moment[s]” that join “the image-world that bids to outlast us all.” Some of them are miracles.