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press:
A December Trifecta at
Aucocisco Galleries:
Scott Davis, Ken Greenleaf, Richard Van Buren
PORTLAND, MAINE—Three artists. Three distinct visions. Three far-reaching
careers. Aucocisco Galleries is proud to announce a unique triple-bill
featuring the work of Scott Davis, Ken Greenleaf, and Richard Van Buren.
This combination of artists—each over sixty years old and each working in
Maine—is nothing less than a visual trifecta.
Raised in Kansas and educated in California, Scott Davis began his art
career in earnest in 1970s New York City as part of the Whitney Museum
Studio Program. Today, Davis’s work is housed in museum collections across
the country, including the Guggenheim Museum (New York), Cincinnati Art
Museum (Ohio) and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla
(California).
Davis describes his spare, ethereal paintings as a visual combination of
Shaker furniture and Haiku poetry—they give viewers “the sense that there
is a real reason for their presence and that there is always an
undercurrent of narrative.”
“I have come to believe,” says Davis, “that my work incorporates the past,
the present, and the continuation of time—a sense of looking towards the
future.”
A resident of Maine since 1993, Davis’s work is already housed in the
collections of the Portland Museum of Art, the Farnsworth Art Museum, and
Colby College.
Artist Ken Greenleaf’s work resides in several of the same local
institutions as Davis’s, as well as nationally in museums such as the
Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Ulrich Museum of Art (Kansas),
and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Texas).
Here in Maine, Greenleaf’s name has been synonymous with art for decades.
His critical writings about art have long appeared in the Maine Sunday
Telegram and Portland Phoenix. As an artist, Greenleaf is the veteran of
over twenty solo exhibitions, including several shows at New York City’s
renowned Tibor de Nagy Gallery. His work has been reviewed in publications
such as the New York Times, Artforum, and ArtNews.
Greenleaf’s recent series of black-and-white drawings and paintings show a
great economy of line honed by his decades of experience. “I seek an art
that is without rhetoric, fiction, or illusion,” says the artist. “We can
apprehend shape, scale, and line in ways that are resonant, and quite
real.”
Like his colleagues, Davis and Greenleaf, Richard Van Buren has a long and
storied connection to the New York City art world—not long after his
relocation there in the mid-1960s, Van Buren was included in the seminal
exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in 1966. He went on to
exhibit with the Bykert Gallery and the Paula Cooper Gallery.
Today, Van Buren is a denizen of Perry, Maine. His work can be found in
some of the country’s finest museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art
(New York), the Museum of Fine Arts (Massachusetts), and The National
Gallery (Washington, DC).
Known for creating brilliantly colored sculpture—which the New York Times
has described as having “a kind of monstrous opulence”—Van Buren will be
displaying two suites of black and white drawings at Aucocisco. In his
“Fundy Series,” Van Buren has drawn inspiration from the light, movement,
color, form, sound, and smell of Passamaquoddy Bay. The artist’s
“Headhunter” series examines what he calls humanity’s constant search “for
the re-affirmation of the human presence.”
Individually, Davis, Greenleaf, and Van Buren each create exceptional art
that bears the considered touch of their extensive and broad experiences.
Shown together, in a single gallery, the impact of their art will be
magnified. This triple-bill marks an exceptional finale to Aucocisco’s
2009 season.
Scott Davis, Ken Greenleaf, Richard Van Buren
First Friday Art Walk Reception: Friday, December 4, 5:00 – 8:00 PM
Showing: December 4 - 26, 2009
FMI and images please contact:
Aucocisco Galleries
Andres A. Verzosa
Owner/Director
Physical: 89 Exchange Street
Portland, ME 04101
Mail: P.O. Box 7897
Portland, Maine 04112
Phone: 207.775.2222
Email: director@aucocisco.com
Website: www.aucocisco.com <http://www.aucocisco.com/>
Gallery Hours:
Tuesday – Saturday, 10:00am to 6:00pm, and by appointment.
Simple and distinct
Solid, serious abstractions
at CMCA
By KEN GREENLEAF | November 11, 2009
“Planes of Abstraction” at the Maine Center for Contemporary Art brings
together five artists with broad experience who share a common interest in
a simplified image. They are otherwise quite different from one another in
their purposes and methods. The artists are Don Voisine, Winston Roeth,
Scott Davis, Jeff Kellar, and Duane Paluska.
In Voisine’s “Veer,” two broad, nearly black shapes cross each other in
the space between two narrow lines of yellow ochre along the painting’s
top and bottom borders. The black masses create a sense that the painting
is an object. That’s an illusion, of course, and as you look at the
painting the feeling of mass conflicts with the plain fact that these are
large areas of paint, creating an expressive tension. Of all the works in
the show, Voisine’s are the most abstract, in that they exist as a
statement outside any concrete reality or rhetorical reference.
Roeth’s paintings, by contrast, are not conceptually abstract at all. Here
he shows three distinct modes: “Split Blue Square,” two related blue
rectangular panels hung one over the other; “Savannah Moon,” a square dark
painting with a few concentric circles; and “Sorcerer,” 12 slate roofing
shingles hung in a three-by-four grid, each painted a different color.
Roeth’s works are primarily about light. The two halves of “Split Blue
Square” are distinguished not so much by their color as by the light
emanating from them — their moods are distinct, and it makes gives them an
expressive shimmer. Even in “Sorcerer,” where the chipped edges of the
slates and holes for the mounting nails are make it clear they are mundane
objects, the overall effect is one of opulent light radiating from some
inner source.
Davis’s paintings are images that refer to something other than the work
itself. He creates a scene whose content is spare but hints at some
reality outside normal experience. “Parapet” is a field of blue with a
geometric yellow shape along its bottom border that resembles a parapet as
seen from below. But something is off — the perspective seems right, but
isn’t, quite. It’s as if the painting was correct and our normal notions
of perspective don’t apply. Davis is subtly bringing us into his own
universe with its own rules, while providing us with a semiotic sign we
can’t quite grasp.
Kellar’s works are almost non-corporeal, the opposite of Voisine’s. They
are done with a special coating on aluminum and seem to float in space an
inch off the wall. This is a deliberate strategy — he’s gone to great
lengths to direct the viewer’s attention away from seeing it as a painting
and toward his actual content, which is the interplay of a subtle surface
with line or color. In “Folded” the upper third of the painting is red,
the bottom is white, and there’s a shallow angle in the border between
them. It feels a little folded; the tension between that illusion and the
soft, tangible surface is central to his work.
Paluska’s painted wood sculptures are more complex. The linear elements of
his constructions join at angles that render them slightly skewed away
from where familiar perspective would put them if they were, say, a chair
tipped over. In “Blue Moon” a flat segment of a circle is held vertically
on wooden framework. As you walk around the piece you see its edge as it
aligns, and then doesn’t, with the angles of the structure. The effect is
a subtle dimensional unfolding and refolding and unfolding again.
It’s an uncommon treat, in these parts, to see a show of the work of
highly accomplished, veteran abstract artists gathered into one room. Much
of what we see today is shallow, noisy, and meant to overwhelm for a
moment. These works are quiet, focused, and deep enough to reward close
attention and extended thought.
“PLANES OF ABSTRACTION” | through December 19 | at Center for Maine
Contemporary Art, 162 Russell Ave, Rockport | 207.236.2875
Growth + maturity
Portland's art scene has changed quite a lot
By KEN GREENLEAF
September 16, 2009T
The Phoenix's first 10 years in Portland roughly bracket the period during
which I stopped writing about art. During that time I also didn't pay a
whole lot of attention to the art scene except for the work of a few
friends and others whose work I cared about. When the opportunity for this
column came up almost two years(!) ago, I jumped back in and found myself
in a very different world.
When I left the Portland Newspapers, where I'd been reviewing for nine
years or so, the Sunday Telegram was the main source of cultural news in
Portland. Turned out I had been there at the high-water mark of its arts
coverage. Now, of course, the Phoenix does much more coverage than its
sadly limping big neighbor across town. Big change.
Portland itself has changed a lot over that time and so has its art scene.
There were, depending on how you count them, three serious galleries in
Portland, of which two, Greenhut and June Fitzpatrick, are still going.
Now there are four or five, plus a small handful of more casual venues. A
lot for a town Portland's size.
In the '90s there were a lot of artists, but not so many you couldn't
know, at least through their work, most of them. Studios tended to be
scattered around in business rental buildings, and were cheap. Now there
are whole buildings devoted to artists' studios, and they're relatively
expensive. An open studio in one building will have dozens of names on its
announcement, too many to see well, let alone get to know their work.
The explosive growth was a local reflection of the now-deflating
international art boom that saw nearly 300 galleries open up in Chelsea.
Also, there is more pressure these days to try to assemble a career
someplace other than New York. It's hard to move to the city with its
extreme prices.
The biennial at the Portland Museum of Art has become, for better or
worse, a central fixture in our cultural life, and group shows in smaller
venues like the Center for Maine Contemporary Art or private galleries
will sometimes grow to include dozens of artists. Enough, certainly, to
boggle the mind of even the most serious art lover. Nobody but Bruce Brown
can keep track of all of them, and I bet even he misses a few. It's hard
to tease a significant signal out of the vast spectrum of background
noise.
That said, I do see a lot of art. The thing that has struck me most is
that the people who are at the top, in terms of making highly interesting,
quality, professional work now are, by and large, the same people who were
doing it 10 years ago. There are a few new people making significant
contributions, and a few who have gone to their reward, but I'm surprised
that there aren't more contenders for the ultimate prize: making something
really worth while.
People like Mark Wethli, Noriko Sakanishi, Charlie Hewitt, Scott Davis,
Alison Hildreth, and Fred Lynch are making some of the best work of their
careers, decades into the enterprise. Maturity can, and does, find its way
into the work of those who persist in pursuing the goal of finding a
unique voice and doing something with it.
Scott Davis:
Seeing an IFO
Published Jan 01 2009, 02:28 PM by Ken Greenleaf
IFO (Arrival), the big (six by nine feet) 2004 Scott Davis painting often
on view at the Portland Museum of Art, is a difficult one and takes some
getting used to. Davis likes to set his own terms, and you have to join in
his visual dissertation to get the full flavor of his work.
It seems simple enough, just a large blue field with the image of two flat
discs floating on it, one smaller disc stuck to the other, larger one. The
edges of the discs are black, and the surfaces are a brilliant orange red.
That's of course if they are discs, with actual edges and surfaces. They
may not be, and that's part of the key to unlocking Davis's nearly
hermetic intentions. Looked at in one way, we have some enigmatic object
floating on a uniform blue sky.
It's not that easy. Davis has slightly skewed the perspective of the
discs, enough so we also are forced to read them just colored shapes,
which of course is what they really are, even if we choose to read them as
discs. The tension between the two readings goes directly to the heart of
the modernist enterprise as it occurs in visual art. There's no real space
in any painting, representational or not. There's just the support and the
paint on it.
By choosing a deliberate awkwardness between, on the one hand, the
illusion of space with a big bright dingus apparently headed toward us,
and on the other hand, a large blue painting with a black and red center
that signifies nothing other than itself, Davis creates an existential
discomfort and doesn't solve it for us. The painting is neither, or both.
There's no way to tell.
The references are very little help. The blue field isn't really a sky,
but it is definitely a field. In physics, a field is any area with similar
properties, like a magnetic or gravitational field. In painting, a field
is the background color. Davis doesn't care to extend to his viewers the
comfort of definitive references, so we don't know which this is. The
commonplace constructs we use to filter our experience the world (‘I'm
standing on the ground' and not ‘I'm held here to the earth because of its
gravity field') are, for the moments we encounter this picture, called
into question. Davis seems to saying ‘If we really pay attention, we will
know that we don't know much.'
That's a disquieting experience, and it gives the painting its resonance. |
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