There's ear candy, there’s eye candy and then there’s “Art Candy,” as seen in the current installation at Art*Bar. Ari David Rosenthal, John Kowalczyk, Brandon Minga and Cassie Genc are the artists featured, and while a sense of vivid color reigns, their styles vary in interesting forms.
Moving between the recognizable and the abstract, Rosenthal addresses landscapes, the body and recognizable portraits including Presidents Obama and Lincoln in manners that draw from forms like Shepard Fairey’s Hope portrait of Obama. Other pieces dwell in what might be presumed to be various visions. The Sedona Blend series shows trees and distant horizons that are given the transient nature of dusk with black shadows tinged by red and orange highlights.
Moving into other parts of the exhibition, we find collaborations between Rosenthal and Kowalczyk. They are a blend of the two artists in many ways, with crisp architectural forms bounded by lyrical abstractions. Kowalczyk, in his solo pieces, particularly exemplifies this. Dreamlike imagery is overlaid by geometric structures of grids and stars and the like. They are indeed mystical, with works featuring totemic images of tigers or compositions like 4th Dimension Chanting Hawk.
Otherworldly in another way are Brandon Minga’s laser engravings and multimedia assemblages. Eschewing overt abstraction, Minga incorporates oddball figures and familiar places plus text, as in his piece Pfister, where a woman’s face and line of a body hover over a depiction of the famed hotel. A bicycle and gears hover around her, recalling the compositions of Dada artist Hannah Höch. The overall impression of Minga’s pieces, with their sepia tones and hardware, is a steampunk puzzle, something to be sorted out, perhaps.
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Genc is a most intriguing artist in this exhibition. Her works are also vivid and colorful, but in the sense of visions and imaginations of space exploration. This is perhaps the delight of her work, in that she shows places, things and people that inspire a sense of the unknown, and her pieces are ready to draw you there. Though billed as art candy, there is substance in this show.
Through April 17 at Art*Bar, 722 E. Burleigh St.
