Detroit Art Review

Critical art reviews of Detroit galleries and museums weekly

Author: Michael Hodges Page 2 of 7

Skilled Labor: Black Realism in Detroit @ Cranbrook Art Museum

By

On November 12, 2023

In Drawing, Paintings

An installation shot of Skilled Labor: Black Realism in Detroit at the Cranbrook Art Museum, which will be up through March 3, 2024. (At left is Patrick Quarm’s Three Transitions.) Running through March 3, 2024 as well is LeRoy Foster: Solo Show. All images Courtesy Cranbrook Art Museum.

Two new exhibitions at Cranbrook Art Museum showcase the considerable talents of Detroit’s African-American portrait painters, both past and present. Both LeRoy Foster: Solo Show, and Skilled Labor: Black Realism in Detroit will be up through March 3, 2024.

Skilled Labor is the larger of the two, and a complete stunner. The very first canvas you’ll see on entering this 20-painter group show is Mario Moore’s huge, undeniably sexy Thornton and Lucie Blackburn in Canaan – with a 21st-century Black couple in bathing suits lying on the Windsor waterfront at night, the Detroit skyline, part of it in flames, across the river.

Mario Moore, Thornton and Lucie Blackburn in Canaan, Oil on linen, 2022.

Chief curator Laura Mott organized this show with Moore,  a 2018 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, and she loves “how he conflates history and time into one canvas.” In this case Moore’s employed contemporary Detroiters to portray the Blackburns, a couple who fled Kentucky slavery in 1833, ultimately making their way to Canada via Detroit and the Underground Railroad.

A bit like Kehinde Wiley, who inserts young, tattooed and dreadlocked Black guys into historical paintings of war heroes on rearing horses (Wiley turned one of those into a sculpture that now sits on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia), Moore recontextualizes and illuminates history by dropping it into a modern framework.

Be sure not to miss Moore’s other large piece, A Student’s Dream, in which the artist himself, staring straight out at the viewer, lies naked on a dissection table surrounded by white doctors – a reference both to Moore’s own brain surgery, and the medical profession’s callous use of Black bodies in decades past for scientific research.

Also grappling with history, though in more sweeping, allegorical fashion, is Hubert Massey’s graphite-on-paper sketch for Forging the Future, a visual explosion of perspective and movement. The resulting fresco now commands the lobby of the new Huntington Tower on Woodward Avenue, just north of Grand Circus Park.

Hubert Massey, Sketch for Forging the Future, Graphite on paper, 2022.

You’re probably familiar with Massey’s work, whether you realize it or not. Among many other Detroit projects, Massey painted the mural on the exterior wall of the College for Creative Studies parking structure at Brush and Frederick streets, and designed the colorful mosaic on the soaring, modernist Bagley Street pedestrian bridge that vaults over the freeway trench dividing Mexicantown.

In pulling together Skilled Labor, Mott said Moore was particularly interested in what he calls “anti-portraits,” depictions that depart from the standard template of subject facing the world. This show has any number of intriguing examples, including several in which the individual in the painting has her or his back turned to the viewer. Consider, for example, Menorah’s Volta: A Light That Speaks by Cranbrook Academy of  Art alum Conrad Egyir, a gorgeous portrait of a Ghanaian woman looking away from us, across a vast African valley.

Anti-portraiture emerges in different fashion with Bakpak Durden’s How they recall his hands, an oddly moving portrait of an African-American man operating the wheel of some machine. The most notable feature is there’s no head above the meticulously rendered work shirt – suggesting, perhaps, that Black men were typically valued for their labor, but not for themselves. Durden, a self-taught multidisciplinary Detroit artist, was the subject of a solo show, The Eye of Horus, at Cranbrook in November, 2022.

Bakpak Durden, How they recall his hands, Oil on etch steel, pine, 2023.

A similar motif emerges in Cailyn Dawson’s three portraits on display, two of which clearly feature the artist herself, and one other, the 2021 “Untitled,” that stars a headless figure wearing a trench coat and white shirt. Said Mott, who first discovered Dawson in a show at Ferndale’s M Contemporary gallery, “When Cailyn talks about her work, she talks about learning about herself. She paints to investigate herself.” Assuming, then, that the untitled trench coat is the artist, one could possibly speculate that its meaning lies in a sort of obliteration or enforced invisibility.

Dawson’s other works are equally enigmatic. In “Seeing Double,” the artist regards herself in a mirror, arms and hands visible in the foreground as well as in the reflection. The point of view almost seems to locate us in her body, with the exact same perspective that she’d have on herself. It’s both a bit disorienting and cool. Finally, in Spotlight the artist, who’s currently getting her MFA at New York City’s Hunter College, shields her eyes with one hand from a blinding light that casts a sharp shadow on the white wall behind her. As unexpected compositions go, this almost rises to the level of anti-portrait. As Mott notes, if this were from a photo series, such a squinting image is the one you’d likely toss. That’s no criticism; the very unexpectedness of her pose is what makes Spotlight so hard to look away from.

Cailyn Dawson, Spotlight, Acrylic on canvas, 2021.

Once you’ve made your way through Skilled Labor, which occupies the first, large gallery as you walk through the museum, do turn left into LeRoy Foster: Solo Show. Moore and Mott initially intended to select painters for Skilled Labor from both the 20th and 21st centuries, but ultimately decided it made more sense to focus on works produced in the last 10 years.

Inevitably, that meant letting go of any number of superb portraitists who are no longer with us. The one exception they made was with LeRoy Foster, born in 1925, whom they decided deserved his first-ever solo show in a museum, one supported financially by the City of Detroit’s Office of Arts, Culture and Entrepreneurship.

Foster, who graduated from the school at the old Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts (predecessor to CCS) and probably studied at Cranbrook, is a fascinating and surprising Detroit character – an unapologetically gay, Black artist in an era when that was perilous on any number of levels. In addition, the Detroiter, who lived in an abandoned theater on Livernois Avenue, was a portraitist in an era, particularly the 1950s and 60s, that mostly disdained any figurative art – much less the sort of lush, physicality Foster had such a gift for.

A reporter from National Public Radio, Mott says, wanted to know why an artist of Foster’s astonishing talents wasn’t better known. Mott laughs. “A Black, queer artist in mid-20th Century doing high-Renaissance style portraits? That was the era of Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism. And here’s Foster, hanging out being completely himself, doing paintings the art world at the time would likely have regarded as old-fashioned.”

Foster may be best known for his mural inside the Frederick Douglass branch of the Detroit Public Library – or the one on display in this show, Renaissance City, that hung for years in the old Cass Tech High School, even after the school was abandoned in favor of a new building next door. A group of Cass art teachers, including Senghor Reid (who’s in Skilled Labor) rescued the mural.

Some time after this exhibition closes in early March, Renaissance City will be installed in the new Cass Tech.

LeRoy Foster, Renaissance City, Oil on canvas, 1978/1986.

This exhibition features 20 contemporary artists who have worked in Detroit over the last decade. These artists include Christopher Batten, Taurus Burns, Cydney Camp, Ijania Cortez, Cailyn Dawson, Bakpak Durden, Conrad Egyir, Jonathan Harris, Sydney G. James, Gregory Johnson, Richard Lewis, Hubert Massey, Mario Moore, Sabrina Nelson, Patrick Quarm, Joshua Rainer, Jamea Richmond-Edwards, Senghor Reid, Rashaun Rucker, and Tylonn J. Sawyer.

Skilled Labor: Black Realism in Detroit and LeRoy Foster: Solo Show will both be at the Cranbrook Art Museum through March 3, 2024.

 

Iris Eichenberg @ David Klein Gallery

By

On October 14, 2023

In Ceramic, Installation, Sculpture, Textile

Iris Eichenberg: Topoanalysis / Wer Bin Ich? will be at the David Klein Gallery in Detroit though Nov. 4, 2023.

An installation shot of Iris Eichenberg: Topoanalysis / Wer Bin Ich? will be at the David Klein Gallery in Detroit through Nov. 4, 2023.  (All images courtesy of David Klein Gallery.)

With Topoanalysis / Wer Bin Ich?, Iris Eichenberg — the German-born, Dutch-educated head of metalsmithing at Cranbrook Academy of Art — continues her probing search for roots and meaning, particularly as found in material objects and places in memory. The solo exhibition will be up at Detroit’s David Klein Gallery until Nov. 4, 2023.

“Topoanalysis” is a term coined by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard and refers to the psychological study of key sites in our intimate lives. And as the question in the title — “Who am I?” — underlines, this exhibition explores identity and personal history through allegorical representations of people and houses that still echo in Eichenberg’s life.

 

Iris Eichenberg, Academy Way, Wood, bark; 16 ½ by 24 ½ by 10 ½ inches, 2023.

The show comes in three parts, employing very different materials: wood, fabric, and pottery. But this won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed the artist’s career since she first landed in America, at Cranbrook in 2006. Creative tools in Eichenberg’s hands have included materials as disparate as her grandmother’s silk stockings and silver spoons, colorful birds crammed in painful cages, knitted mittens, glistening ceramic vessels, or, in the case of her 2020 show The Center Piece / The Blank, white and dark-gray discs hung from elegant, wide strips of black fabric. From a distance, the wallscape read almost like modernist architecture.

What Eichenberg said in this writer’s first conversation with her 14 years ago is clearly still as apt as it was then, and amounts to a sort of design philosophy: “I always try to encounter and fight with new material.” Indeed she does.

In Topoanalysis, Eichenberg’s constructed simplified “houses” up to a couple feet tall that look a bit like giant versions of children’s blocks. Each structure, rendered in warm, contrasting wood tones, is a stand-in for someplace the artist lived, where memories and emotions are deeply lodged. Some of these houses are attached to poles with a cross-piece or handle at the far end, suggesting, perhaps, that even a house constitutes a tool.

 

Iris Eichenberg, J.P. Lennepkade 287/289 (Table), Wood, French linen, 30 by 76 ½ by 44 ½ inches, 2023.

It’s worth noting that for all their simplicity, the workmanship on these wooden sculptures is gorgeous, as are their compositional arrangements. An absolute knock-out, even if a total mystery, is J.P. Lennepkade 287/289 (Table), where a house resembling a Monopoly token you’d put on Park Place hangs several inches above the floor, suspended by a wooden dowel and cross-piece hanging from a tidy slot in the middle of a handsomely constructed table.

Interestingly, Eichenberg – an artist of multitudinous talents – milled all the wood that went into Topoanalysis from an old walnut tree that had to be taken down in a friend’s garden.

The artist’s current residence at Cranbrook, designed by Eliel Saarinen, is represented by a squat, gabled affair titled Academy Way that rests on a large, curvaceous piece of bark. (Other houses often sit on a cushion of beige French linen.) As it happens, the bark is not flush with the floor, but has a low “arch” in the center, right where you expect a solid foundation line. Stand back a ways, and you can see light peeking through from the far side.

 

Iris Eichenberg, Wer Bin Eich, French linen, brass weights, charcoal, 100 by 98 by 52 inches, 2023.

Compared to the wood houses, something entirely different is going on with Wer Bin Eich, an eight-foot-tall house built of draped French linen hung from hooks, a little like a quickly erected tent. Of all the works in the show, this is perhaps the most enigmatic, not least because of the rough charcoal sketch facing it on the wall a couple of feet away that echoes its outline in quick, slapdash strokes. If the wooden houses suggest permanence and solidity, Wer Bin Eich trumpets instability and the fragile nature of human constructions.

Peering down at these artifacts are three muted, abstract portraits of friends of Eichenberg’s – Ilse, Ida, and Frida. Their faces are rendered in dribs and drabs of meticulously stitched fabrics, ranging from cheesecloth to horse hair to damask.

 

Iris Eichenberg, Ida, French linen, gold linen, cheesecloth, mopcloth, rabbit fur, produce bag, Chinese silk, 72 by 48 inches, 2023.

Finally, the show is capped by a series of nine dark-gray earthenware vessels, some resting on wooden shelves that almost act as frames, and one cozying up to one of her wood houses.

These are not the fine, glossy ceramics Eichenberg’s made in the past. In their slumping and swelling, these primitive, near-black earthenware vessels feel almost organic – like zaftig body parts — with mouths that yearn to talk or pour. It’s hard not to see them as animate little… somethings.

All in all, Topoanalysis is an intriguing, sometimes dizzying mix. As Wayne State art historian Dora Apel wrote in “Essay’d” in 2019, in a comment that applies equally well to this domestic installation, Eichenberg’s work “evokes alienation and dislocation, combined with a sense of yearning for comfort, warmth, and attachment.”

Iris Eichenberg, Black Earthenware Pot, Wood, black earthenware, various dimensions, 2023.

The solo show Iris Eichenberg: Topoanalysis / Wer Bin Ich? will be up at Detroit’s David Klein Gallery through Nov. 4, 2023.

Abstraction @ David Klein Gallery

By

On June 28, 2023

In Paintings, Sculpture

Together & Apart: A Legacy of Abstraction at the David Klein Gallery, Detroit.

An installation shot from the opening of Together & Apart: A Legacy of Abstraction at the David Klein Gallery in Detroit, up through July 22.  All images courtesy of David Klein Gallery

The abstract revolution that rocked New York City and the art world in the late 40s and 50s was, famously, a mostly male affair — in the popular narrative, at least, a testosterone-fueled explosion of masculine energy and creativity.

Except, of course, there were women working in abstraction and producing epic work at the same time, like Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson or Helen Frankenthaler. They just didn’t get the headlines, a phenomenon Mary Gabriel explores at length in her 2018 book, “Ninth Street Women.”

Rebutting the notion that abstraction and machismo are connected at the hip, the David Klein Gallery in Detroit is hosting Together & Apart: A Legacy of Abstraction, which will be up through July 22. The Klein show spotlights four artists – Elise Ansel, Caroline Del Giudice, Alisa Henriquez and Rosalind Tallmadge. (The title, Together and Apart, comes from a Virginia Woolf short story from 1925 that explored artistic affinity among several women friends.)

“In the history of American art,” said gallery director Christine Schefman, “the New York school is where abstraction happened, with all those macho guys – DeKooning, Pollack, and so on.   There were women there, and some of them became quite successful,” she added, “but they were definitely secondary to the men. The men were the geniuses.”

The women on display at David Klein pursue very different paths, from painting-and-collage to welded steel geometric forms, to name two. Drawing from different genres was, of course, part of the fun of pulling the show together, but Schefman says the women work well in unison, with their differing visions bumping up against one another. “They all have,” Schefman said, stopping for a second to pick the right phrase, “a feminine take. When you see their work together, there’s a certain harmony.”

Rosalind Tallmadge, Oberon, Mica, glass beads, sumi ink, Caplain gold leaf and sequin fabric on panel, 60-inch diameter, 2023.

Brooklyn artist Rosalind Tallmadge works with the most-exotic materials in the show, including mica, glass beads, Caplain gold leaf and sequin fabric. The majority of these works-on-panel are round, giving the distinct impression of alien worlds seen from outer space — deeply fissured and cratered landscapes with a dull metallic glint, both otherworldly and surprising.

A 2015 graduate of Cranbrook, Tallmadge was featured in that institution’s 2021 retrospective, With Eyes Opened: Cranbrook Academy of Art since 1932. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn. She was the subject of a solo show, Terrain, at David Klein in 2021.

Elise Ansel, Obsidian Butterfly II, Oil on linen, 50 x 44 inches, 2022.

 As an undergrad at Brown University, Elise Ansel fell back in love with Old Master paintings of the sort she’d seen as a child at the Frick Collection in New York City, and their drama and grandeur inspired her contemporary abstract oil-on-linen canvases – albeit reinterpreted and stripped of all figurative and narrative elements.

All the same, these canvases pack much the same emotional and visual drama, which Ansel, who got her MFA at Southern Methodist University, pumps up with deft use of color, and gestural forms that often appear to be in motion.

In editing out stories from great masterpieces, Ansel universalizes the pieces, broadening their possible meanings. She also, perhaps, feminizes the great masterpieces of yore, at once creating images both subtle and evocative – with not a Great Man in sight.

“I realized that these exquisite paintings were presented from the male point of view—as if that was the only one that mattered,” Ansel told Boston Magazine in 2022. With force and delicacy, the Maine-based artist succeeds in subverting the art-historical male gaze.

Caroline Del Giudice, Twirl III, Powder-coated steel, 24 x 29 x 25 inches, 2023.

 Caroline Del Giudice, another Cranbrook grad, is a Detroit-based artist with a metalworking studio in Redford where she crafts a range of welded-steel sculptures. The three brightly colored distorted arches that greet you as you enter read as massive, heavy objects – even though they’re actually only two feet tall and just a bit wider.

Each sports a great colored, slightly reflective surface  – crimson, purple and yellow, respectively – that’s kind of magnetic, looking very much like some industrial product of the highest order. And while their shapes describe a rounded arch of sorts, the geometry has been stretched, as it were, with one leg of the broken circle a step behind the other.

This contradicts your first assumption that these must be circular forms, at the same time that the staggered legs invest the structures with much greater visual stability. You could knock over a regular arch. Not these constructs. They stand their ground.

Alisa Henriquez, Sweet Nothings (detail), Acrylic, oil, digital prints, fabric and glitter on canvas, 63 x 53 inches, 2023.

Alisa Henriquez, who teaches at Michigan State University and got her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design, in some ways gives us the most obviously feminine works in the whole show. At least, that’s the case with Sweet Nothings, in which a woman’s eye and fingers with painted nails play starring roles in this absorbing collage. The eye, in particular, is hard to avoid – just off-center and nicely done up in mascara, it stares out at the viewer with a questioning gaze that feels just a little sad.

In all six of her painted collages, Henriquez mixes colors with abandon, sketching out geometric objects and oddball shapes that often overlap or bleed into one another. These are crowded, active works – each quadrant, cut from the rest, could be a freestanding painting. In that sense there’s no real center, more of an intriguingly disordered visual universe.

Elise Ansel, Rosy Fingered Dawn, Oil on linen, 44 x 50 inches, 2022.

Together & Apart: A Legacy of Abstraction will be at Detroit’s David Klein Gallery through July 22.

Brenda Goodman @ Simone DeSousa Gallery

By

On May 20, 2023

In Paintings

Back on Willis Street, at Detroit’s Simone DeSousa Gallery

An installation shot at the opening of her solo show, Back on Willis Street, at Detroit’s Simone DeSousa Gallery. This image is courtesy of DAR. 

Art-wise, New York is a famously tough nut to crack. Cass Corridor legends Gordon Newton, Bob Sestok and Michael Luchs all gave it a shot decades ago but, for various reasons, came back to pursue their careers in Detroit.

Not so Brenda Goodman, one of several talented women who gave the hard-drinking Corridor boys a run for their money back in the 1970s, a talented cohort that also included Nancy Mitchnick and Ellen Phelan.

At 80, Goodman – whose solo show of recent work, Back on Willis Street, is at Detroit’s Simone DeSousa Gallery through June 10 – has finally achieved the sort of success 99 percent of artists who flock to Gotham, stars in their eyes, can only dream of. “Brenda’s the best-known and most-successful artist of the Cass Corridor,” said gallery owner Simone DeSousa. “We have so many amazing, significant artists here, but their work and stories have never really gone much beyond local awareness.”

In a nice touch, Goodman’s Detroit exhibition comes exactly 50 years after her very first solo show. It was 1973 at the Corridor’s legendary Willis Gallery, some eight years after the artist graduated with a degree in painting from the old Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts (now the College for Creative Studies).

It’s been a big year for Goodman. Back on Willis Street follows hard on the heels of her solo show in Manhattan that closed in March, Hop Skip Jump at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., the big-deal gallery in Chelsea that represents the artist, who moved from Manhattan to the Catskills in 2009. Goodman’s work has always refused to bend to commercial whims and now commands impressive prices.

Brenda Goodman, This Is the House that Jack Built, Oil, mixed media on wood, 36 x 47 inches, 2022. Photos courtesy of Simone DeSousa Gallery.

Her early paintings were achingly personal, almost confessional. In the 1994 Self-Portrait 4, a grotesque humanoid with wild eyes is jamming globules of something – some say impasto paint – into her mouth, much of it dribbling down her huge frame with its skinny, almost vestigial arms. The piece is creepy, dark, and deeply unsettling; the self-loathing behind it hits you like a hot wind.

Some have tried to draw a line between those “diarist” works, representing a powerful emotion at a given moment in Goodman’s life, with the equally dark abstractions she switched to starting in 2010, giving up figurative paintings. But the artist insists the abstractions do not tell a story per se, and have more to do with her playing with shape and color than reflecting anything about herself. Her geometric abstracts are often slashed with deep incisions made with a linoleum cutter or Dremel drill press. Some have likened the carved lines to scars, which would fit with some of her painful figurative work, but Goodman doesn’t buy that.

“I don’t think it has anything to do with scarring,” Goodman told Hyperallergic in 2019. “I’m using the linoleum cutter to do automatic writing. I used to do it with black oil marks all across the surface. Now I’m just doing it with the linoleum cutter: pulling out and using the shapes and forms which are generated, and letting that lead to the next shape.”

And Back on Willis Street is about nothing if not shapes. In a work like the gorgeous Shadows of Love, purplish-brown triangles, trapezoids and rectangles are stacked like so many foundation stones, set off here and there by unexpected splashes of yellow, lavender and blue.

 

Brenda Goodman, Shadows of Love, Oil, mixed media on wood, 36 by 47 inches, 2022.

DeSousa, who’s an artist herself, calls Goodman “a painter’s painter,” one who’s been laser-focused on “constant exploration and a directness about how she approaches her work.” But the Back on Willis Street paintings, all done in the past two or three years, stand out among the abstractions she’s produced ever since a beloved dog died 13 years ago.

“These works are lighter,” DeSousa said, “with washes of color” not seen in much of the earlier work. In another shift, Goodman’s started including references to some earlier paintings in some of the contemporary pieces. With Shadows of Love, there’s a tiny figurative insert on the far right – a running woman with a traumatized-looking face. 

 

Brenda Goodman, Shadows of Love (detail), Oil, mixed media on wood, 36 by 47 inches, 2022.

 In many ways, Goodman’s turn to abstract paintings helped foster her ascent to the big stage. They also garnered heightened interest. Author, editor, and major local collector Suzy Farbman has a large Goodman hanging in her dining room next to a standing cross by Ellen Phelan. In her recent book, Detroit’s Cass Corridor & Beyond, Farbman wrote, “As Brenda worked her way from very personal, cartoon-like images toward a unique form of abstraction, I became more attracted to her work. Today,” she added, “I’m an unabashed fan.”

One painting, in particular, stands out among the collection at the De Sousa Gallery. Whose Winning has the feel of something oddly, dramatically different. Largely black and deeply scored, creating her trademark mosaic of shapes, the work is topped by a burst of many roundish colors, a bit like a bouquet, and two pink tendrils or “arms” that hang down and seemingly embrace the painting. And at the very bottom? An odd little yellow trapezoid that DeSousa says “balances” the whole work and also makes the black and bright colors alike pop.

Brenda Goodman, Whose Winning, Oil on wood, 60 by 72 inches, 202

DeSousa had long wanted to do a solo show for Goodman, and Back on Willis Street has been in gestation for some time.  Reflecting on her origins, Goodman spoke about how different her work was from that produced by most of her Detroit compatriots back in the day. “My work was different from the other Cass Corridor artists,” she’s said. “They were mostly guys who used materials like barbed wire and surfaces with bullet holes. Detroit was a rough place, and they were representing the city. My work had a surreal feeling, and it was very personal. It was based on what was going on in my life at the time. But we were still a group, and it was really nice.”

Brenda Goodman, The Sun’s Gonna Shine, Oil on wood, 36 by 45 inches, 2023.

 

An installation shot of Brenda Goodman speaking at the opening of her solo show, Back on Willis Street, at Detroit’s Simone DeSousa Gallery through June 10.

Brenda Goodman: Back on Willis Street, at Detroit’s Simone DeSousa Gallery through June 10.

 

 

Mel Rosas @ Wayne State University

By

On April 26, 2023

In Paintings

The Foreign Intimacies exhibition by Mel Rosas is at the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery on the Wayne State University campus.

An installation image of Mel Rosas’ “Foreign Intimacies” at the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery. Image courtesy of DAR.

While teaching in Canada decades ago, Wayne State professor emeritus Mel Rosas found himself struggling to stay awake just before dark as he was driving across Saskatchewan. But he snapped right to when he came upon the obstacle in the middle of the road.

Rosas, a painter whose show Foreign Intimacies is at the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery on Wayne’s campus through June 2, initially assumed the creature was a cat. But as he leaned on the brakes, he realized the animal was far too big. It was a mountain lion.

That twilight encounter, he said, was both “surreal and other-worldly.” Remarkably, it’s an experience he’d repeat, in much the same fashion, years later while driving through his father’s homeland, Panama. Again, the first glimpse down the road suggested a cat. But on closer examination, it turned out to be something entirely different and far more spiritual and thrilling – a black panther.

Mel Rosas, The Day of the Panther, Oil on panel, 48 x 48 inches, 2015. All painting images courtesy of Mel Rosas.

These brushes with mythic felines materialize in a 2015 work, The Day of the Panther, that’s well worth seeking out if you go to the exhibition. Here we find ourselves on a nameless street well south of the border. Centered dead ahead, right in our line of sight, is the panther — a black silhouette against a rich green background – who’s carefully making his way across a dirt road. We’re looking through a doorway in a wall, a device Rosas uses frequently and to great effect — an opening that ushers us from this stained and peeling world to a more lyrical place. On our side of this threshold, all is every day and a little grimy. Contrast that with the verdant countryside on the other side, where the cat’s pacing and the image is nothing short of transporting.

Rosas’ work straddles the line between a waking dream state, on the one hand, and soiled reality on the other, albeit rendered in the rich hues of the Caribbean.  It would be easy, given the material, for the artist to romanticize – or worse yet, exoticize — these urban vignettes. But Rosas works in unsentimental realism, at least when he’s sketching out the walls and streets that constitute the foreground, or scrim, of these compositions. The colors may be lush, but the walls are pock-marked and streaked. There is, of course, an undeniable pathos to decay, but the real romance here lies in the distant vistas espied through windows, doorways, and apertures of all kinds. It’s as if the work operates on two levels – a flat picture plane facing the viewer and portals that give way to hopeful worlds beyond.

The paintings in Foreign Intimacies were mostly worked from drawings or photographs Rosas has taken on his travels over 40 years through Panama, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Peru, Brazil, and Cuba.

At first, the colorful streetscapes in Foreign Intimacies might look to be empty, but that’s not the case. Many sport an individual, but never more than one — and that singularity, as with Edward Hopper’s under-populated canvases, makes the relative emptiness echo all the louder. Rosas, who studied art at Drake University and Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art, attributes this in part to his own nocturnal storylines: “When I dream,” he said, “I find myself alone, walking around a semi-familiar environment.”

Which, in a way resembles Rosas’ take on being a foreigner abroad in Central and South America. As a “half-gringo,” he said, he still feels like an outsider looking in, never mind his family connections in Panama. Indeed, as he notes, the show’s title, Foreign Intimacies, underlines this paradox. “These experiences were foreign,” he said, “but strangely familiar.”

Mel Rosas, Pare, Oil on panel, 30 x 42 inches, 2012.

 A number of the paintings on display clearly come from Cuba – a fact given away by the awesomely preserved American cars from the 1940s to the early 60s that figure prominently in them. One good example is Pare (Give way), a particularly handsome color study starring what looks to be the back half of an early-Sixties, two-tone Ford Falcon painted a gleaming mustard yellow with a white roof. At the far end of the frame are two walls, one a matching mustard, juxtaposed with a neighbor in exuberant pink. Uniting the whole composition is a large wall in the middle, rendered in mottled shades of soft green. Mustard yellow, hot pink, sea green, and back to mustard — it’s a gorgeous, balanced composition.

Mel Rosas, Memory, and Artifact, Oil on panel, 24 x 36 inches, 202

The 2021 Memory and Artifact looks to be from Cuba as well, with its mint-condition four-door from the Forties. And once again, it’s a color study of sorts, although this time in monochromatic shades of brown and dark beige. The only exceptions are a few splotches of light blue on walls framing a neo-classical doorway, which look as if posters have been ripped down. For its part, the automobile is pristine, the architecture old and distressed.

Mel Rosas, El Policía Muerto, Oil on panel, 12 x 12 inches, 2016

Learning on another trip down south that the Panamanian term for speed bumps is “dead policemen,” Rosas knew that, by hook or by crook, he had to work that into a painting somehow.  The result is El Policía Muerto from 2016, which in many ways hits the political reality in some countries harder than the other paintings here, with its portrait of a heavily armed and flak-jacketed member of the Guardia Civil standing guard by a doorway near a car parked just short of a speed bump. Once again, the color is well curated. The wall behind the soldier is a fading turquoise, while the car – with a hood that doesn’t quite close – is an off-putting shade of dull, lemon yellow. It’s a brilliant choice for a work with undercurrents of politics and fear. The tension set up between the turquoise and the ugly yellow knocks the whole painting slightly off-kilter, which works to great advantage.

 

Mel Rosas, La Gentrificación, Oil on panel, 36 by 36 inches, 2016.

Installation image, Latin percussion with dancers at the opening. 2023 Courtesy of DAR.

“Foreign Intimacies” by Mel Rosas will be at the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery on the Wayne State University campus through June 2.

Page 2 of 7

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén