‘Generations’ at Racine’s OS Projects

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I started wondering about the nature of industrial complexes that perform very subjective operations as soon as I left OS Projects in Racine. How did the painting complex compare to the academic industrial machine? These and other unmanageably grand thoughts were spurred on by a fantastic conversation with Vera Scekic, the gallery owner and artist who’s always an able stimulant, and because I was about to drive 14 hours through the night…so I was more than happy to give my mind a hollow bone with peanut butter in the middle of it to chew on.

I had stopped by OS to see a two-person show by Jerrold Belland and Andrew Larson, called “Generations,” at the urging of a friend, which runs through October 14. That friend told me that it was “like real, meaty, roll-up-your-sleeves painting.” I agreed after only a few moments in the presence of the work, but then almost as quickly wondered what that even means. Not only what is real and meaty, but what isn’t. 

“Meaty” in the case of “Generations” means paintings with any number of signs that the work comes from the core of the artist. Heart, gut, chest. Turns out that Jerrold Belland is a long-time public school art instructor in Racine and Andrew Larson is one of his former students, which adds a level of weight to the exhibition from the outset. But beyond that human connection, the paintings maintain a touch, presence, and spontaneity that puts them into what today is rare company. One would think that in a world on the verge of being run by artificial intelligence on glowing screens that artists would naturally lean toward the “real” side of things: the irregular, odd, skewed, and personal. But it’s not the case. Even in a world rife with identity-based painting, it rarely lands on a strange individual perspective. Rather, it identifies the collective thoughts about individuals. And to boot, most of this painting is as flat as painting was in the late ‘60s, when flatness was a shiny new concept. Now, instead of being a concept, it’s a secondary attribute; the result of pressures from social media, pandemics, and short attention spans. 

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Resisting Conformity

Belland and Larson avoid these pitfalls simply by resisting conformity. That is, by being natural. Two paintings in particular, one by each artist, land perfectly. The first is Belland’s Coffee, a five-by-eight-foot monster canvas featuring snow-trimmed rooftops presumably seen from a studio window. There’s no horizon, the gabled roofs of working-class Racine homes in the foreground build vertically giving way at the top to brick industrial buildings. It’s all painted with a quick and light touch in colors as electric as the scene in reality is not. Choices by an artist painting exactly what he knows with exactly what he has: his own sensibility and point-of-view. With all its representational geometry the painting flattens and expands remarkably, almost as a commentary on geometric painting itself, and, by contrast, this current-day flatness of spirit. 

Around the corner from Belland’s large painting of Racine’s exterior is one of its interior. Andrew Larson’s wall of oil painted beer cans is typical of his hyper-particular, domestic genre compositions. But it too is an exterior. Of cans. Like Belland’s houses, the painting, titled David Berman, seems to be about flatness itself, which is to say it’s about painting. It’s a sneakily wonderful oil-on-canvas because of how it invokes the long history of tromp l’oeil illusionistic paintings of artists like William Harnett, while keeping the discussion firmly in the world of painterliness and particulars. It also throws some red meat to the Wisconsin faithful with a nostalgic inventorying of beer consumption. While both works happen to make great cases-in-point, they’re not outliers, the rest of the work in the show sings with similar odd and personal intimacy. 

The back-and-forth Vera and I had about industrial complexes was pretty wooly and involved education, painting, and canons of art. We both wondered if the complexes meant to offer us highly interpretive qualities like “wisdom,” “vision,” and “essence” can ever avoid being reverse engineered by thirsty publics and artificial mechanisms. We concluded that American higher education began on a quest for truth four centuries ago and is now being devoured from the inside by rubrics, administrations, consultants, and students looking for objective answers confirmed by pieces of paper. Painting too was once a searching and organic pursuit of visionary presence and is now being contemplated more and more as a copy of itself on a screen. I don’t know where this is leading us, or what it even means in an ontological sense, but I know that it still thrills me to witness some weirdo with a brush, two eyes, and a story, painting what he knows best. And I like it even more when there’s two of the same.

Openings: August 27– September 2, 2023

North Shore Library

  • North Shore Library Art Fair
  • Sunday, Aug. 27, 9 a.m.–2 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
  • Sunday, Aug. 27, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Village Park, Menomonee Falls

  • Art in the Park
  • Sunday, Aug. 27, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Charles Allis Museum of Art

  • Storytime at the Allis
  • Sunday, Aug. 27, 1–3 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Drop-In Tour: Architecture and Collection Highlights
  • Sunday, Aug. 27, 2–3 p.m.

Forest Home Cemetery

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  • Walking tour: Cream City Art Collectors & Benefactors
  • Sunday, Aug. 27, 2–3:30 p.m.

Racine Art Museum

  • Opening reception, RAM Fellowship and Emerging Artist Exhibition
  • Tuesday, Aug. 29, 6–8 p.m.

Charles Allis Museum of Art

  • Draw at the Allis, Free Drawing Class for Adults 62+
  • Wednesday, Aug. 30, 4–5:30 p.m.

Warehouse Art Museum

  • Artist Talk Series with Nirmal Raja
  • Thursday, Aug. 31, 4 p.m.

Art Bar, 722 E Burleigh St

  • Opening reception, “Off-Kilter Art Exhibition”
  • Friday, Sept. 1, 6– 9 p.m.

5 Points Art Gallery + Studios

  • Opening reception for “The Black Woman Tabernacle: she IS god” by Kottavei Love
  • Friday, Sept. 1, 6–8 p.m.

5 Points Art Gallery + Studios

  • Opening reception for “Dark Matter,” by Joya Jean
  • Friday, Sept. 1, 6–8 p.m.

345 N. Broadway

  1. Third Ward Art Festival
  2. Saturday, Sept. 2, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
  • Saturday, Sept. 2, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Story Time in the Galleries
  • Saturday, Sept. 2, 10:30–11 a.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

  • Drop-In Tour: Architecture and Collection Highlights
  • Saturday, Sept. 2, 2–3 p.m.