Author: deborah-mcleod

Life is strange. It is the human condition to believe that it isn’t going to be—it’s going to just be normal. But thanks to myriad little agendas, paranoias, psychoses, gullibilities, superstitions, love, loss and loneliness, it just goes on, fascinatingly and disturbingly peculiar.

Tim Taunton’s surreal, grotto-style paintings offer outright evidence of this. The works in “Through the Looking Glass” are intimate images of existential situations: Miniature, exquisitely rendered protagonists stand in the midst of some vast place, minimally defined by a landmark or two—a Greek ruin or a geological formation—always brightly illuminated by a benign cerulean sky, which offers a somewhat inexact sense of Divine Providence. And while Taunton may exaggerate the circumstances—and the outfits—just a little, his color-saturated, pared down, shoebox-sized psychological landscapes attain an unsettling déjà vu quality.

Each forsaken place threatens to be rather frightening, but Taunton protects viewers from his characters’ isolation through constricted vertical gateways into each scene, not to mention a few odd costumes. Whether decked out as a harlequin, a bride, or ready to rocket into space under an aerodynamic funnel hat, their clothing conveys their charming individuality and chutzpah. They seem pretty much O.K. with their threatening circumstances; they are the dreamers who composed these places.

Taunton seems particularly interested in division and equilibrium. The realm of the sky balances the volume and clutter of the earth; vertical figures are often balanced by a horizontal shadow; and some scenes are cut precisely in two by a monolith. Doorways divide one space from another, just as the picture’s wide entrance divides us from Taunton’s narrative. These splits make the images feel a little static and contrived, but that’s kind of the point of the surrealistic gamers, who have always had an interest in toying with and halting time. Most important, Taunton’s paintings maintain an almost perfect equilibrium between mild tragedy and dark humor.

John Borden Evans’ current show of recent work at Les Yeux du Monde Gallery is just so John Borden Evans. And I mean that in a nice way.

There’s something strangely wonderful, fresh and unabashed about Evans’ work, something he upholds in each subsequent painting, even though his style remains unchanged and his repeated theme over many years invokes the same immediate surroundings—his family’s rural North Garden home. The work, however rich in apparent innocence, functions to remind us of the vagaries, complexities and omens in the simple, even habitual encounter. Chickens, sheep, cows, nearby and distant trees all going through their lives’ seasons, populate the scenery as per usual.

Odds and Evans: Les Yeux du Monde reanimates the everyday with works like “Autumn Leaves VI” in an invigorating exhibit by John Borden Evans.

Evans relates each narrative almost as though it is a fairy tale—an invitation to venture into some irresistible place, simultaneously real and imaginary—so off we go, arrested by his canvas fable. We might sit transported upon the floor, arms around our knees, leaving ennui behind, as the narrative in Evans’ paintings bring us back some of our lost childhood wonder.

But that’s not all. Because we know too much of the world, the paintings must tease out and pay tribute to our slowly cultivated neuroses, too. They do this primarily through their obsessively patterned and psychologically directed surfaces.

In most of Evans’ paintings, voluptuous layers of new media supersede and hide old conditions in their ambiguity, but those influences ghost before us nonetheless, offering each scene a supernatural quality, an aura of the past. Or, the artist scrapes down through the paint layers for further nuanced verification of a lingering presence, as though every immediate vista was a scrim for another latent one—one of Evans’ finer strategems.

Many of the scenes in this show evoke dusk or nighttime events and mysteries. This seems to be a particularly spectral period for Evans, when fears may be amplified but transformative forces become less inscrutable. Van Gogh-esque stars radiate their wild, wavering spirals or geometrically faceted penumbra. In “Robins” 23 fat, little, north-facing birds glow in their own haloed realms as the sun crests the horizon. The birds function as dynamic pattern, as shamanism, as a hiding device for something palpable beneath them, as ground cover and as simple fact.

Compared to some past work, this collection of Evans’ paintings is of a somewhat more benign nature. But running throughout every body of painting from this artist, accompanying the imaginary naiveté, the hearth-and-home animism and the textural introspection, there is always Evans’ quiet sense of delight and humor made in and as a sanctuary from a world that otherwise takes itself so seriously.

Almost from the outset of his retrospective at the UVA Art Museum, it seems that Gabriel Laderman has a hyper-Euclidean bone to pick with nature. The early cityscapes with which co-curators Lincoln Perry, David Carbone and Langdon Quinn introduce the exhibit demonstrate the artist’s early classical landscape approach. But “Unconventional Realist” is reorganized to suit Laderman’s objectives, sharply elbowing the distant countryside with contrived geometry while also nudging Abstract Expressionism, the style of the day.

Faithful to a New Yorker’s innate comfort with structure and hardscaping—the intersection of planes, the corners and platforms of light and shadow, the unorthodoxy of a singular painted wall—Laderman reveals his prophetic viewpoint of the world. The supremacy of rooftops softened in the sallow atmosphere of commerce once seemed an ambitious ideal: A spire—by rights, by simple manifest destiny—should overtake and demoralize a mountain, just as any revolutionary idea should explode a past sentiment or inspiration. But by the last painting in “Unconventional Realist,” Laderman leads his generation to see the folly in this thinking.

You break it, you buy it: Gabriel Laderman pushes the limits with works like "Still Life No. 5" at UVA Art Museum.

Laderman makes a small if astute adjustment of the intellect; he begins to paint still-lifes as an array of individualistic, man-made forms that nurture a haphazard relationship with the edge of a table. Pitchers, vessels, aspic molds and an occasional loose egg assemble into weighted groups, nudging each other like subway riders toward the precipice. These still-lifes—sort of Georgio Morandi in high def—offer a demure segueway from painting a premanipulated place to constructing a theater of event. They depart from a believable stance to tempt a dubious one, proposing—in spite of the artist’s signature Klieg lighting—darker days ahead.

The curators jump another decade to take us there with Laderman’s plot-thickening 1984 allegorical triptych, “Murder and its Consequences.” In “Murder,” as in the other figurative paintings that complete the show, one sees a grander motif and culminating style developing. Laderman’s paintings become more overtly narrative, self-referential and wicked. The perspective is carved up and exaggerated, the situation hardens under an acrid mustard glow, the reserved formal balance is trashed in a chaos of matter, yet that unreliable tabletop prevails.

Simultaneously, a general sense of discord and isolation and male narcissism of scale flow through the final scenes. These works gather to confirm the dramatic “consequences” of the first lawless act—to kill off natural order through the assorted brutish desires and forays they confess. Laderman places it all on his little table; he chooses full disclosure over disclaimer.