Photo courtesy of Var Gallery West (Between Two Galleries)
The work in “We Might Have Been Born Yesterday, But We Stayed Up All Night” featured the examples by recently minted painters from the UW-Milwaukee painting program, displaying the former students’ foundational understanding of the craft mixed with a little local fairy dust.
I am asked regularly whether my art school experience was worth the money. I usually say what I got in return for my tuition was eight really good artist friends who I’ll know forever, but that I might have been able to buy on the free market for half the price. That’s my snarky answer. There’s also a more romantic and nuanced response. Those eight friends were also, hopefully, emboldened by my presence in their lives, and we were all simultaneously energized by our mutual decision to immerse ourselves inside an unpredictably fertile crucible at a specific time. Therein lies nebulous and incalculable value of a program.
The work in “We Might Have Been Born Yesterday, But We Stayed Up All Night” at Var Gallery West (Between Two Galleries) features the examples by recently minted painters from the UW-Milwaukee painting program. It was organized by Shane Walsh, a professor, painter and sometimes mentor to the artists in the show. Despite superficial differences, the work maintains a streak of continuity that verges on being a “thing.” Not quite the East Village in 1982, but its filiated swagger is enough to make one want to know what well they were all drinking from.
The paintings in the show are generally large, confident and superbly composed. Take Jordin Alanis’ fluid, close-cropped figural composition, Us, Together built from luscious linear brushstrokes on a large, raw canvas. It checks the boxes of de rigueur figuration but is also firmly aware of the grammar of abstract painting. Its compositional sensibilities and elegant restraint allow it to avoid offhand classification. It’s simply a great painting—upside down, it could pass as a late Willem De Kooning.
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There’s nothing new under the dim glow of an Instagram feed. Given this, we visual foragers at the end of history can only look for the jarring, compositional, phrase-turning present in work by artists like Emily Tripp and Alyssa Krause. Both work in mid-20th century idiom, yet we intuitively glean the 2020-ness in the work. But how? Is it Krause’s juicy reimagining of Arthur Dove’s high-chroma forms in seas of parched tonality? Or perhaps it’s Tripp’s construction of spatially confounding abstractions that seem only possible from the mind of digital-age mind. Yes, maybe. And so, we scour their work for clues, tells and final resolutions, ultimately left with ambiguity and the infectious presence of both temporal and universal signs of painting’s endless recombinatory possibilities.
Nicholas Perry conjures truly weird portraits in oil paint that almost defy classification. You could say—and I think I have in a past review—that Perry is channeling a little Pablo Picasso and some Francis Bacon, but the thrust of the work is his own idiosyncratic vision. Finally I Can Cry, his contribution to the show, presents a skewed and fractured image we identity as a figure only by a single eye, a shock of hair and the basic conventions of figure ground separation in traditional portraiture. Despite the controlled chaos, one can tell Perry knows how to make a painting in the most traditional sense. In fact, it would be difficult to manage such chaos if he didn’t. Joe Steiner’s painting Hawthorn also presents us with a portrait, rather, two of them, in profile. It also has referents in modern painting, namely German expressionists like Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Ernst Kirchner, but after the vague nod to these predecessors Hawthorn goes off in its own visual journey. Steiner’s paint passages are willful and fluent, building to a richly colored figural painting wrapped around the sturdiest of abstract scaffoldings.
Rachel Horvath, too, treads a fine line between the language of abstraction and representation. There’s no identifiable worldly content in her 30 x 20-inch painting (slightly smaller than others in the show,) but the space created by formal elements is so crisp her painted forms read as physical constructions. Like the rest of the work in the show, Horvath’s Cardinal demonstrates a deep grasp of the elements of painting and form, which she uses to effortlessly build her own language.
The common denominator here seems be a structural understanding of the craft. We would assume this came through the program they all shared. While many of the works in “We Might Have Been Born Yesterday” display the sort of fashionable indulgences—lumpy figuration, pink and teal in combo—it’s to be expected from young artists; our mature world would be far less interesting if kids weren’t inventing their own private cool every generation. But this group wears it all with class because they’re anchored in the bedrock of painting, right down from Peter Paul Reubens, Nicolas Poussin, Henri Matisse et al.
To make an art world, we can consult New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl’s beloved recipe: “You move to a city…You form a gang, turn it into a scene and turn that into a movement.” But what turns a group of individuals committed to making and learning into a “school” of ideas? And what turns it then into a movement? Knowing for sure requires a cultural sorcerer’s level of dark magic that maybe only Malcolm McLaren and Charles Baudelaire ever grasped in real time. But based on the work that’s come out of UWM painting over the past few years, receptive students introduced to foundational knowledge, mixed with a little local fairy dust can make a bunch of things into a “thing.”
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Opening This Week
“Sand County Reflections” Feb. 21-April 4 Schlueter Art Gallery, Wisconsin Lutheran College 8815 W. Wisconsin Ave.
This art exhibition features the work of guest artists who were inspired by Aldo Leopold’s classic text, A Sand County Almanac. The book was selected as Wisconsin Lutheran College’s 2019-’20 “Campus Read.” The exhibit is one of several campus events planned that will highlight the thoughts and perspective of this renowned Wisconsin author, ecologist, philosopher and conservationist. Wisconsin artists whose works will be on display as part of this exhibit include Shelley Heath, Ellen Anderson, Brett Henzig, Laura Gottlieb, Colette Odya Smith and many others, all hailing from throughout southeastern Wisconsin. For more information, call 414-443-8800 or visit wlc.edu/sand-county-reflections.
“The Trajectory Series” Feb. 28-July 26 Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum 2220 N. Terrace Ave.
Villa Terrace’s “The Trajectory Series” is a new exhibit that is guest-curated by Christopher Willey, director of UW-Milwaukee’s Immersive Media Lab. The series is an art exhibition that examines how creative behaviors advance cultures and technologies. This 21-week-long, immersive exhibition will feature works by 10 artists, and, through artworks, interactive media, events, storytelling and an artist residency by Marianne Fairbanks, “The Trajectory Series” will seek to explore a future we are only now beginning to imagine. For more information, call 414-278-8295 or visit villaterrace.org.
