Beauty Reigns exhibition review at the McNay Museum in San Antonio
Read my latest exhibition review on the "Beauty Reigns" exhibition at the McNay Museum, in the May/June edition of NHOME Magazine.
Jose Alverez, Kamrooz Aram, and Paul Henry Ramirez are also three of the artists in Beauty
Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting were also featured in the amended hardcover catalogue of David S. Rubin’s (Former Brown
Foundation Curator of Contemporary Art at San Antonio Museum of Art) Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art since the 1960s exhibition; curated March 2010.
Not quite Psychedelic Lite, Beauty Reigns has its own flavor mixed with
examples of somewhat overused identities, boarding favoritisms. With a stylized
artistic appeal, Barilleaux sought to have the audience leave the museum walls and journey into a
new realm, met by stimulus that engages us; reflective of acquainted and non-familiar imagery -- worldly as well as
mysterious. He accomplishes this task and gives voice to a new generation of
mixed eclecticism that breeds cohesive thought—visually and conceptually.
Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting is on view at the McNay until August 17, 2014. The exhibition then travels to the Akron Art
Museum in Ohio, where it will be on view January 24, 2014 – May 3, 2015.
Read the article online at:
page 68-69
Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility
in Recent Painting at
the McNay Museum captures a post-graffiti
sensibility mixing visual elements of design, illustration, graphics, and
artistic liberties; drawing the viewer into a world of sensory overload.
The McNay Museum’s press release says
“Beauty Reigns features
the work of thirteen intergenerational emerging and mid-career abstract
painters, working in studios across the United States. The exhibition is organized by René Paul
Barilleaux, the McNay’s Chief Curator/Curator of Art after 1945, and celebrates
the exoticism, exuberance, and optimism found in the artists’ work. Among the
shared characteristics found in this highly diverse group, in whole or part,
are high-key color, layering of surface imagery, use of overall and repeated
patterns, stylized motifs, fragmented representations, and a tension between
melancholy and the sublime.
The
exhibition surveys works by artists with both national and international
perspectives. Americans Annette Davidek,
Nancy Lorenz, and Ryan McGinness are based in New York. Charles Burwell lives
and works in Pennsylvania; Paul Henry Ramirez in New Jersey; Rex Ray in
California; Rosalyn Schwartz in Illinois; and Susan Chrysler White in
Iowa. Global visual vocabularies are expressed
in works by Jose Alverez (D.O.P.A), born in Venezuela and based in Florida;
Kamrooz Aram, Iran/New York; Jiha Moon, South Korea/Georgia; Fausto Fernandez,
born in Texas, raised in Mexico, and currently based in California; and Beatriz
Milhazes, a Brazilian Native who continues to live and work in her home
country.”
“Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility
in Recent Painting confirms
a vitality of abstract painting today,” Barilleaux said. “This exhibition requires that the viewer
travel to and voyage through visual territory that seems somewhat foreign, or
somewhat familiar, yet always rewarding.”
Only a Thief Thinks Everybody Steals, by Ryan McGinness is the highlight
of the museum presentation, summarizing the overall aesthetic of the
exhibition; staying true to all organizational prose and manifested ideals of
what Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility
in Recent Painting is about. We see a throwback to advertising, Middle
Eastern and Eastern tapestries and a certain post-pop construction. With
Barnett Neuman-esque mannequins, corporate logo deviations, bold graphic
symbology, animal pattern, royal crests, and linear fetishes – McGinness layers
hue with heavy-loaded and hedonic sensibilities. Our eye, looking for anchor is
greeted with neon yellow overload, garish greens, a post nuclear pink
apocalypse, and a cobalt calamity; all radiating internally –pulsating like
cells, heating up for a visual artistic
explosion.
Meanwhile, Big Perfume by Rosalyn Schwartz exemplifies the simplistic susceptibility of Modernist
tendencies that bridged the Cubist constructions. Schwartz is visually recycled
from Barilleaux’s recent curatorial “A
Brief History of Seduction”, an exhibition that just ended in January 2014. We
are familiar with her work enough to understand the attraction and seductive
nature for Beauty Reigns: A
Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting, but upon first glance the
simplistic nature of Big Perfume is
far from Barilleaux’s extrovert exercise, or his “exoticism, exuberance, and optimism.” Pink vase outlines match up
to Cubist views, resting on pedestals turned arches. A still life arrangement of grapes is back
dropped by vertical stripes on the right, balanced with a yellow fade to black
composition on the left side -- filled with intersecting lines. Minus all the
provocation arrangements, compositions, and gestalts of the other artworks in
the exhibition, Big Perfume gives a
calm to storm; a breather of sorts that allows for historical digestion in an ultimate-urban
portrayal.
Comments
Post a Comment