At Argazzi, Images of Mystery And Apprehension

    As usual in her group shows, Judith Singelis at Argazzi Art has brought four disparate artists together for this summer exhibition. But the two best works in the gallery are not officially in the show.

   Eric Aho’s large, abstract black and gray painting has been moved to a small space off the entry gallery, but the impact of his thick, layered paint is as powerful as it was in a more congenial location. And a wonderful Jimmy Wright oil, “Still Life on Oriental Carpet,â€� is a swirling tangle of dying flowers with deep emotional colors — reds, yellows, black-greens — an odd combination of impressionism and abstraction.

   Anne Siems, a native of Germany but now a Fulbright Scholar at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN, paints idiosyncratic, ghostly pictures of figures with full faces but with bodies and costumes through which backgrounds — usually trees, grass, plants — show. These odd pictures are clearly influenced by American and (I think) Mexican and South American folk art as well as by European painting of the Renaissance. They are haunting and dramatic.

   Kevin Bean, a San Francisco painter Singelis knew during her days in California, used to mix figurative pictures, the figures usually had featureless faces, with geometrics. Now he paints only colorful, geometric shapes.  The three small works at Argazzi have these colorful shapes stacked like bricks.

   Kathy Moss is another painter of singularly odd pictures. (One of my companions wouldn’t stay in the room with them, while another loved them.) On carefully prepared surfaces she brushes layers of thick, mostly white and off-white paint to build up a final, near visceral surface.  Then she paints a few black-red berries or a dead peony somewhere on this painterly plane. It’s all quite mysterious and repetitive.

   Finally, there is Katherine Bowling, a landscape painter who is mostly about light and shadow.  Her surfaces are meticulously built:  A matte fresco-like surface receives thinned oil pigments which, when dry, are sanded and sanded in many directions.

   Then paint is applied by brush, roller, rubbing. The result is light dissolving into shadow, as in real life. There is real emotion in these pictures: apprehension, regret, memory, and perhaps hope in the fading or coming light.

     Argazzi Art’s summer group show continues through Aug. 28 at the gallery, 22 Millerton Road, Lakeville, CT.  Hours are Friday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., or by appointment.  860-435-8222

     

     

     

     

     

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