Baker vs. Killian

One of my favorite aspects of artmaking is the discourse that inevitably follows the artworks completion. Yes, I know that much of what gets created never makes so much as a ripple of critical attention. But, Bruno Fazzolari's recent show at Gallery 16 yielded two very different view points. The first was the noted SF Chronicle critic Kenneth Baker's review in the Saturday May 2 edition of the newspaper. The other was penned for SFMOMA's Open Space blog by Kevin Killian, noted playwright and novelist. While these two reviews are very different in intent and tone, it started me longing for more real-time battles of opinion in art criticism.

Here's to hoping for more art critical lucha libre!
The two reviews for your indulgence.

Kenneth Baker (courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle),

Fazzolari at 16: Bruno Fazzolari's paintings and drawings at Gallery 16 present connected problems that I do not encounter often. His work leaves me equally unsure of how seriously to take it and of how to take it seriously.

Consider the painting "Griefly Thurible" (2009). Should we regard it as unfinished or as effectively unbegun? The forms and gestures in it seem both rehearsed and relaxed to the point of abandonment from lassitude. What might count as allusions - to Philip Guston's late manner, for instance - never quite congeal.

Yet nearly every piece on view evokes volleys of inner disputation that conclude with manifest decisions unintelligible to anyone else. Only a symptomatic trail of ambivalence remains.

To learn that Fazzolari has adapted certain forms and marks from comics and other vernacular illustration only makes us wonder whether we have mistaken his report of a cultural condition for peculiarities of his own temperament.

Fazzolari has given his ongoing series of ink drawings the title "Six Realms." It echoes the Buddhist notion of the six realms of being into which karma may cause a soul to be reborn, but even the Buddhist spiritual vision takes on a comic-book bizarreness from the perspective of contemporary pop culture's cynical materialism.

Fazzolari's work exemplifies the surprising and not necessarily likable forms that sophistication takes in contemporary art.

Opening and Closing by Kevin Killian

Over the weekend I finally got over to Gallery 16 to see the last week of Bruno Fazzolari’s exhibition Cold Turkey, a selection of drawings broken up by six recent paintings. This is the last week you can see it, so get down there if you can. As you probably know, the Gallery is only a few blocks from SF MOMA, at Bryant and Third, and if you haven’t been there it is one of the pleasantest places I know with always plenty to see. This time around Fazzolari‘s show is a winner indeed.

The drawings come from a series called “Six Realms” on which the artist has been working for many years; apparently there are dozens of them. I took the traditional gallery walk, with a map in my hand of what I was seeing, and proceeded from left to right, an arrangement that usually adds no meaning, only the comfort of habit. This time around however, I convinced myself I was catching something happening in those drawings, that I was seeing them progress from simple gestures towards more complex renditions of the social world. From the self — even the self of the young child — to perhaps the loss of that self within the increasingly organized and globalized state. I looked again — made the circle one more time — and by George, I was so pleased with myself!

Nowhere did I manage to agree with even a single word of Kenneth Baker’s review — but wait. I can imagine a few of my readers don’t know who Baker is, but he is the highly respected art writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. He’s been at his post so long that when I first came to San Francisco and I was gullible, someone told me, and I believed it for a time, that he was the man they named the phrase “a baker’s dozen” after. (Boy did I feel like a fool when I told someone that, and they proved that the phrase was established in, I don’t know, the era of Chaucer!) Cold Turkey seems to have flickered simultaneous off and on switches in Ken Baker. Like Gerald Manley Hopkins or someone, Baker is nearly impossible to summarize, but you can read for yourself the review that made me so curious. The particular picture that gives KB so much trouble, “Griefly Thurible” (2009) is, for my money, utterly convincing and never brought late Guston to my mind, but to get there I would really have to have more art training I suppose. If the work in the show is guilty of too much “sophistication,” I, suspiciously, tend to embrace it.

What does the title mean? I asked Fazzolari. “Cold Turkey,” he explains, “is a phrase which has been on my mind for awhile–I like phrases which slip away from their literal referents, but double back on them. Several other reasons why: It refers back to my food work (which I don’t do anymore); to the free-fall of the economy; to the fact that it’s my first show in 8 years; to a state of naked awareness–bracing perception without crutches–before you recognize/decide what you’re seeing. Then I asked him if he had heard about the new movie coming out by the makers of Borat. It’s called Bruno, and I suggested it would give his name new currency. His face grew dark with fear, then he lightened up. “Growing up in Tucson, Arizona, with a name like Bruno was a challenge,” he laughed. “And just when I’d outgrown the taunts now here comes Sacha Baron Cohen to finish me off.”

Darren Waterston in SF Chronicle

Waterston's Big Artistic Gamble Pays off
Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle

Saturday, April 25, 2009

The art public has accepted installation too uncritically as an open-form mode of invention. Masterly examples by artists such as Dan Flavin (1933-96), Joseph Beuys (1921-86), Jannis Kounellis and Barry Le Va have unintentionally paved the way for all sorts of slack, self-indulgent production by others.

So San Francisco painter Darren Waterston risked a lot when he set out to create at Stanford's Cantor Center his own version of a Victorian "mourning parlor."

In it, he daringly mingles his own paintings and watercolors with relics of the university and of its founding family. Any note of flippancy or false feeling might have poisoned the whole affair.

Extremes meet here: the Victorian obsession with remembrance of the dead, with its class-conditioned overt display of grief, and contemporary culture's instructions to "get over it" and indulge our instinctive wish to deny mortality.

When 15-year-old Leland Stanford Jr. died of typhoid fever in Florence, Italy, his parents embarked on an eight-month procession of mourning that made headlines and culminated in the founding of Stanford University in the boy's memory.

Of course, we continue to profess and feel sympathy for anyone whose children die, especially when they die young. But we regard as pathological the immersion in grief expected of privileged Victorians, particularly women.

Waterston does not take sides. He merely sets up the polarity of attitudes, challenging us to position ourselves within it, hence the aptness of the installation mode, which makes positioning an issue on one or more levels.

Some visitors may accuse Waterston of morbidity or disrespect for including the plaster death mask of young Leland. But the object paradoxically reanimates a representational literalism that to us seems artistically bankrupt. Perhaps postmodernism's ironic and embittered treatment of representation in art disguises unarticulated fears of its magic.

Waterston has designed his own woodblock-printed black-on-brown wallpaper, incorporating butterflies and an owl motif based on a taxidermied owl in the Stanford family collection. Like a spreading stain, some 3,000 synthetic black morphos butterflies adorn the ceiling above a circular padded bench.

Yielding to the cushioned bench's implicit invitation to sit and contemplate Leland Jr.'s exemplary death proves surprisingly hard to do.

Placing his own plainly anachronistic oil paintings in this environment must have given Waterston pause. For years, his paintings have evoked something of the strange unease that comes of recognizing oneself as a conscious organism. The setting of "Splendid Grief" heightens the paintings' reminiscence of the Victorian vogue for seances and belief in the individual's spirit as "ectoplasm" that might extrude itself from the body and even survive it.

Such notions lay closer to the historical origins of abstract painting in Europe than the Constructivist tradition acknowledges.

On an unpapered wall, Waterston has scattered family memorabilia, including contemporary and posthumous portraits of the deceased Leland Jr. He has interspersed these in the salon-style hanging with his own watercolors and ink drawings of motifs, invented and borrowed, evoking omens of death and dreams of its transcendence.

Waterston's Haines Gallery show in San Francisco contains new paintings and works on paper suffused with moods and aesthetic effects similar to those he orchestrates in "Splendid Grief." His mastery of fluid media is apparent in both shows, particularly in the haunting watercolors at Stanford and in grand paintings on panel at Haines, such as "Assumption" (2008).

We see too seldom the alignment of artistic difficulty with difficult issues and feelings that Waterston achieves in these concurrent shows. People who genuinely enter into them will not soon forget them.

Rex Ray: I'm Done!

On the evening of February 12th, we held an opening to congratulate Rex Ray on his upcoming solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Visitors to Gallery 16 were treated to a special treat as Rex used the opportunity to complete paintings for the MCA in the gallery! Folks were able to witness the process Rex has developed to compose his unrelenting abstractions. He layers hand painted papers and cuts the biomorphic shapes freehand with an xacto blade. Most artists would balk at the idea of producing work in such a public setting, not Rex. He was relaxed conversational and gave the crowd a lesson in the power of saying yes! A video of the evening is below.

Rex Ray at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver

Curated by Cydney Payton

For Rex Ray, the joy of making and viewing art is his continuing motivation. Drawing inspiration from his acknowledged influences—the Arts and Crafts Movement, Abstract Expressionism, organic and hard-edged abstraction, pattern and textile design, and Op Art—Ray playfully combines these formalist concepts with decorators’ tips gleaned from lowbrow publications and sources of popular culture in his pursuit to create beautiful things. Gracefully bridging the gap between fine and applied art, he distinguishes himself in each realm.

As a fine artist, Rex Ray works in a wide range of media, including painting, collage, print works, and photography. His collages grew out of the simple pleasure of cutting shapes from magazine pages, assembling and gluing them to paper to create visually pleasing works that have since developed into sophisticated resin-covered panels. In his large-scale canvas paintings, like the one on view at MCA DENVER, he conceives abstracted landscapes from biomorphic shapes and distinct color combinations as a fresh adaptation of an aesthetic that sympathizes with twentieth-century Modernism.

Ray’s work exudes beauty with a subversive edge that stems from an attitude grounded in alternative subculture. He was an early admirer of punk and new wave music. Music holds a special place in his life. A former record store employee and devoted collector, he has worked with leading contemporary musicians, contributing designs for many album covers and concert posters for artists such as Radiohead, Björk, Nine Inch Nails, Deee-Lite, and David Bowie.

Rex Ray was born in Germany in 1956. He lives and works in San Francisco’s Mission District. Before moving to California in 1981, he was a longtime resident of Colorado Springs and he still maintains his connection to Colorado. In 1988, he received a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute, CA. His paintings, collages, and designs have been widely exhibited at galleries and museums, including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, San Jose Museum of Modern Art, CA, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA. He is an accomplished graphic designer with a client list that includes Apple, Sony Music, and The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY.

Rex Ray: It's finished when I'm done!

For anyone who has followed Rex Ray's career and has been curious as to how these inspired abstractions are created, come watch him do it!

Rex is preparing for a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, which opens in March. He is currently in the studio finishing the artwork to be presented in the MCA show, including the largest painting of his career, an epic 9 x 25 foot canvas.

Gallery 16 has always been a place were artwork is not only exhibited, but created. Equal parts studio and gallery. So, in this spirit we asked Rex to finish the work for the MCA show at Gallery 16. We will host a very special event Thursday, February 12, 6-9 pm where guests will be able to enjoy music and cocktails and watch Rex work on the final stages of the 9x25 foot painting throughout the evening. Please RSVP to be part of this unique opportunity. vanessa@gallery16.com.