An installation image of Mel Rosas: La Frontera at the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art in Detroit. Also on view are two other shows — Darcel Deneau: Remnants, and Omo Misha: Whatsoever Things Are Pure. All three exhibitions are up through Jan. 23.
Detroit’s N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art is hosting three separate exhibitions by Detroit artists – Mel Rosas, Darcel Deneau and Omo Misha – very different practitioners of their craft, and yet each an undeniable colorist with a strikingly personal intensity. Gallery director Izegbe N’Namdi says she brought these three together at the same time because she likes the dialogue they set up with themselves, as well as with the other two artists.
Longtime Wayne State University art and art-history professor Mel Rosas takes us once again to a mostly imaginary Latin America in La Frontera, where his eye generally lands on street scenes defined by deeply saturated colors and, not uncommonly, a solitary pedestrian passing across the canvas, as with Primo Textura, below.
Mel Rosas, Primo Textura, Oil on panel, 24 x 36 inches, 2024.
Rosas’ life, as he tells it, has been an exercise in straddling various lines or divisions. Much of this runs bone deep, perhaps springing from his experience growing up as a half-Panamanian, half-American kid in homogenous Des Moines, Iowa. (He overcame in part by becoming a high-school baseball star.)
This neither-one-side-nor-the-other philosophical orientation plays out in his artistry as well. He’s particularly drawn, he told the Detroit Art Review in 2023, to opposites, as with his highly realistic painting style that, counterintuitively, all the same often manages to convey dreaminess and uncertainty.
As critic Matthew Piper put it in a 2016 Essay’d, “With their luscious surfaces, painstakingly lifelike textures, and subtly surreal depictions of almost-possible places, Rosas’ paintings are portals that offer the artist passage into his Latin American ancestry, and the viewer into a lush and evocative dream world.”
Indeed, passages and openings nearly always figure in Rosas’ work, sometimes framing an impossibly verdant landscape, or the immensity of the ocean itself. But with this show, La Frontera – easily translated, and, you’ll note, yet another line or division – the doorways are mostly closed, as with Primo Textura, or open into an impassable hellscape as in The Four Elements (Fire).
Mel Rosas, The Four Elements (Fire), Oil on board, 8 ½ x 11 inches, 2008.
It’s something of a departure for Rosas. Generally in the past these glimpses through doors and windows pull us into beguiling natural landscapes, but with The Four Elements, this aperture is full of threat and menace. Not to wax too psychological, but if these portals are in their way windows into the unconscious, Four Elements offers up a troubled and troubling vision, indeed.
Rather more enigmatic and possibly hopeful is The Need for Angels, in many ways the most surreal piece that Rosas has in this show. We’re presented with what appears to be a freestanding blue wall that also acts as a film strip with holes for sprockets at top and bottom, all framing black-and-white ads for movies set in large, deep squares. To the left, a giant pink arrow points at the classic image from filmmaker Wim Wenders’ 1987 “Wings of Desire,” with a trench-coated Peter Falk sporting angel wings, standing on the edge of a rooftop. Yet to his left, in case we thought this was all mysticism and reverie, a fire is in full and violent eruption from within a metal garbage bin.
Mel Rosas, The Need for Angels, Oil on canvas, 48 x 72 inches, 2024.
Izegbe N’Namdi says the first time she saw work by Rosas, she was immediately sucked into the piece at hand, landing in her a deeply meditative frame of mind. It’s a judgment the artist might well treasure.
Darcel Deneau, Heading West, Stained glass and found objects on wood panel, 12 x 16 inches, 2024.
Detroit artist Darcel Deneau works in a rarefied medium – constructing large mosaics out of tiny shards of stained glass, as with the current show, Remnants. It’s painstaking, time-consuming work. Moreover, colored glass always runs the risk of being “too pretty,” thereby trivializing its subject, whether fair or no. Darcel nicely avoids this trap by working with urban vignettes drawn from Detroit streets – “throwaway” shots of cars and buses and traffic lights, what you could call your standard city-road view.
A particularly nice example of this is Heading West – looking down Warren Avenue from Woodward toward Old Main at Wayne State. A striped, mint-colored city bus taking up the right side of the frame is reflected in nearby puddles, while a sunset edges, convincingly, from yellow-orange to chilly blue and lavender overhead.
Omo Misha, Brotherhood (The Mother’s Garden Series), Oil on canvas, 48 x 60 x 1.5 inches, 2025.
The third exhibition on display is Whatsoever Things Are Pure by Omo Misha, aka Misha McGlown, a multifaceted artist and curator. (The title comes from a Biblical passage.) Among other positions, Misha – a Detroit artist with a large presence in New York City – is curator of the Windows on Amsterdam gallery at City College of New York. In Detroit, she’s worked with various groups, including the Irwin Gallery on West Grand Boulevard.
Her art ranges widely, but in this particular case Misha gives us a series of fairly realistic portraits of young people. Several canvases are bright and highly vivid. But Brotherhood: The Mother’s Garden Series is set in a landscape of soft green on the edge of a forest. Its subjects, however — little boys dressed to the nines in their Sunday best — are rendered in shades of brownlish-gray, setting them off from the rest of the canvas.
But the focal point of the painting is the doll the smallest boy, right there in front, is holding out in front of himself. The doll is a veritable technicolor feast with rich yellows, reds and greens that sets up a striking and otherworldly contrast with the monochromatic children.
Three shows, Mel Rosas: La Frontera, Darcel Deneau: Remnants, and Omo Misha: Whatsoever Things Are Pure, will up at the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art in Detroit through Oct. 30. Three artists’ talks are scheduled, each from 2 to 4 p.m. on Nov. 8 (Omo Misha), Dec. 13,2025 (Mel Rosas), and Jan. 10 (Darcel Deneau).
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