Tag: Les Yeux du Monde

Categories
Arts Culture

‘Picasso, Lydia, & Friends, Vol. V.’ at LYDM

“Picasso, Lydia, & Friends, Vol. V.,” on view at Les Yeux du Monde through October 27, features works by William Bennett, Anne Chesnut, Dean Dass, Rosemarie Fiore, Lydia Csato Gasman, Sanda Iliescu, Megan Marlatt, Pablo Picasso, David Summers, and Russ Warren. Photo courtesy of Les Yeux du Monde.

Opportunities to see works by a modern master of art in an intimate gallery setting do not often arise in our part of the world. Les Yeux du Monde provides just that with its current exhibition, “Picasso, Lydia, & Friends, Vol. V.” 

The show brings together six prints by Pablo Picasso with contemporary works from eight artists influenced by the aesthetics and academic contributions of the Spanish artist and the acclaimed Picasso scholar Lydia Csato Gasman, respectively. The collected work functions as a way to share world-class masterworks with the Charlottesville public, while also honoring the legacy of Gasman, LYDM founder Lyn Bolen Warren’s late mentor. 

“Apart from Picasso—whose work is included in the exhibition, given it was the focus of Gasman’s scholarship—each of the exhibiting artists personally knew Gasman, many having been her colleagues in UVA’s art department,” says Les Yeux de Monde Director Hagan Tampellini. “Each credits Gasman or Picasso with influencing their work or thought in some way, which can be felt in the experience of the show.” 

Picasso’s prints present the viewer with unexpected images. Three still-life lithographs—atypical examples from the artist’s oeuvre—depict fruit, flowers, and glassware, with evidence of the artist’s hand used to manipulate the ink. Two lyrical etchings, illustrating Picasso’s muse Marie-Thérèse Walter with delicate line work, flank a visually heavy aquatint portraying a goat skull. The juxtaposition of youth and vivacity is striking against the weight of inevitable decay.

Installation view from “Picasso, Lydia, & Friends, Vol. V.,” on view at Les Yeux du Monde through October 27. Photo courtesy of Les Yeux du Monde.

The goat skull is complemented by Russ Warren’s “Faces,” a large-scale acrylic painting featuring dozens of skull-like visages. The notion of death is echoed again in Gasman’s “The Angel of History,” which employs thick impasto, gestural marks, and a saturated palette of colors. A sheet of aluminum serves as both the sky and a stand-in for aircraft engaged in wartime bombings. The depiction of angels is carried over in a suite of elegant ink drawings by Sanda Iliescu, which also connect beautifully to Picasso’s etchings through similarity in line weight and simplicity of form.

Another exciting example of curation occurs between print and painting, where David Summers’ “New Light on Picasso’s Snack, plus Water” hangs next to Picasso’s “Pommes, Verre, et Couteau” (Apples, Glass, and Knife). Here we see how the artists attune to the same subject matter: Summers the painter traffics in the representation of light, while Picasso as printmaker is far more concerned with form.

Throughout the show, pops of vibrant color punctuate the visual rhythms produced by monochromatic prints, drawings, and paintings—alluding to acts of both love and violence. LYDM presents a balanced exhibition design keeping the viewer engaged, and seeking out both formal and thematic connections, in the disparate yet related works that grace the welcoming gallery space.

Categories
Arts Culture

Mentor and student unite in artistic dialogue at Les Yeux du Monde

Isabelle Abbot’s “Morning Glow” is on view as part of “Influence + Conversation” at Les Yeux du Monde. Image courtesy of LYDM.

Artists Isabelle Abbot and Barbara Campbell Thomas met when Abbot was a student in the MFA program at UNC Greensboro where Thomas was a professor. Thomas became an important mentor to Abbot, helping her achieve a looser, freer painting style and chairing her thesis committee. “Influence + Conversation” at Les Yeux du Monde reunites the two women in an exhibition showcasing their parallel approaches and ongoing artistic dialogue.

The most potent tie linking the two artists is their shared appreciation of the natural world and what this brings to their respective practices. “Barbara has always been very supportive of my time outside in nature,” says Abbot, who became a regular visitor to Thomas’ farm while she was a student. “She talked a lot about note-taking when you’re outside, moving through the world and observing things.”

These plein air notes, a central facet of both artists’ practices, help build a visual language they can draw from. Thomas, whose work is abstract, uses what she gleans from her forays outdoors to develop what she refers to as contemplations of an interior landscape. Her paintings combine sewn fabric, collaged elements, and acrylic paint. “I don’t start with a solid piece of material; I basically build it piece by piece, using small sections of fabric, to form a ground that gets stretched. When I’m done with the sewing, I start adding the paint and collage. 

“When I learned the technique of piecing fabric together it was like a lightbulb went off. I felt like it was the knowledge I needed. I don’t want to start with a large expanse of unblemished canvas; I want to make that too. It’s not something that’s a given. Instead, I build the ground myself.”

“Dear Star” by Barbara Campbell Thomas. Image Courtesy of LYDM.

Thomas’ reduced palette of blues and grays is inspired by a rag rug made by her great-grandmother. The rug features a pattern of diamonds, a motif Thomas has incorporated into “Central Medallion.” In this work, the artist plays with space in an abstract way. Surrounding the center diamond, four squares of fabric are attached to each other. Where the seams meet, the strips of material don’t exactly line up, imparting a kind of jangly energy to the piece. Lighter colored painted fabric around the edges frame the dark center, making it pop. 

Optically, the thrust of the work appears to be receding down a deep well, while at other times, it feels like it’s extending out toward you. This spatial push/pull animates the work and reveals Thomas’ interest in how movement affects observation. “The visual rhythm and visual cadence of my work is aided by the fact that my body’s in movement,” she says. This attention to rhythm and cadence is also seen in “Night Space,” which features a prominent horizontal direction, and “Dear Star,” which brims with staccato intensity.

Abbot’s connection to the physical landscape is more obvious, although in many works she embraces an abstract direction, using landscape as the jumping-off point. She creates her preliminary sketches outdoors, then takes them back to the studio and tapes them to the wall. “I look at them and see what I would call my go-to marks, my go-to shapes that I put together in different ways.” Moving from one painting to another, you begin to see elements of that vocabulary: descending slopes, triangles, and similar amorphous forms that crop up repeatedly.

In much of the work on view, Abbot, who excels as a colorist, favors a highly keyed palette of turquoise, yellow, and cerulean. Yet in “Ode to Greenwood,” she uses a more naturalistic color scheme. The painting reads true to nature, but in approaching the picture, you see how the color is created with a gutsy amalgamation of gestural hues that work together to describe reflections on water, the choppy contours of soft, muddy land, and shadows. 

In “Morning Glow,” blotches of bright pigment, resembling the fiery flecks that shimmer within an opal, denote pinkish sunlight glinting off structures and objects on distant ridges. The furthermost peaks are washed in pale yellow and pink, and Abbot uses vibrant brushstrokes and vivid aquamarine to convey a mountainside bathed in sun, tempering this bold choice with the dark verdant green of the adjoining hill.

For Abbot, like Thomas, it’s not just being in nature, but moving through nature. “For a long time, I painted the landscape like I was looking out a window at it. I framed it and composed it and then painted it.” But now she tries a more immersive approach, capturing the landscape in a holistic way. “It’s something that’s not way over there … you’re in it.” You see how this is implemented to great effect in “Field’s Edge,” a pastoral scene that is not just a stunning image, but is infused with the sensual qualities of its subject—buffeting breeze and warm sun—elements experienced by the artist firsthand and interpreted so effectively for us using her personal artistic language.

Categories
Arts Culture

Making contact with the eyes of the world

Dean Dass’ exhibition “Passenger Manifest” is on view at Les Yeux du Monde through June 30. Photo by Stacey Evans + LYDM.

Art has the power to transform us, to transport us through time and space. Sometimes it takes us to other worlds or allows us to see our world differently. In short, art is powerful, and I haven’t seen enough of it lately. Aside from attending an interesting art exhibition at Visible Records a few years ago, I haven’t done enough to explore Charlottesville’s thriving art scene. When someone told me about Les Yeux du Monde gallery (the French translation is “the eyes of the world”), I knew how to sate my art craving. The current exhibition, from renowned artist and local legend Dean Dass, is titled “Passenger Manifest,” and it runs to the end of June.—Kristie Smeltzer  

What

A visit to Les Yeux du Monde art gallery.

Why

To let my soul wander (and wonder) in the presence of moving visual art.

How It Went

Magnificently—I see the world a bit differently now, and you can, too.

My journey began as most do these days … with GPS guidance. It’s worth using GPS, even if you know the way, just to hear how the bot pronounces “Less Yucks duh Mond.” Somewhere a Parisian citizen just toppled over in pain, and I’m sorry—but the pronunciation is solidly funny.

The silliness ended there (mostly) because as I drove the long, winding lane flanked by trees, it felt like entering a different world. Sculptures appeared in clearings: whimsical, brightly colored constructs that invited the imagination to play. As I crested the hill, the gallery came into view. The unique structure looks both foreign to the verdant setting and completely at home, nestled into the surroundings with abundant windows to let in the outside world.

Gallery Director Hagan Tampellini welcomed me into her mother Lyn Bolen Warren’s vision. Hagan continues her mother’s legacy, running the gallery since Warren’s passing in 2021, and based on her enthusiasm for art and the artists the gallery represents, I can only extrapolate the magnitude of her mother’s passion for modern art. The gallery is open Thursday through Sunday from 1-5pm and by appointment. Exhibitions change every other month. The building looks deceptively small from the outside, but inside the high ceiling and vast number of windows make it feel expansive yet intimate. Hagan staffs LYDM with the help of interns, and visitors can explore exhibitions solo or get insights from the knowledgeable staff.

As Hagan led me around, I marveled at Dass’ dedication to his craft. The collection features oil paintings of various sizes and other works that include drawing and collage techniques. But here’s the thing: Dass invests his effort and expertise into every stage of the act of creation. The paper? He makes that from flax and hemp that he grows himself. Even the frames are Dass originals, and their subtle differences in size and color add to the character of the collection. The work feels both cerebral and approachable (I say like I know much of anything about art).

This exhibition includes imagery that frequently appears in Dass’ work, such as clouds, helmets, tents, orbs, and landscapes. Its central idea is that we’re all vulnerable beings traveling through life, which sometimes (or often, according to Dass’ big, beautiful brain) means one should wear a helmet. Some pieces burst with kinetic energy, while others invite a sense of stillness that feels spiritual. Beyond the power of the art itself, the space enhances its impact. Thoughtfully placed windows perfectly frame trees outside, and you can shift your gaze from one of Dass’s ethereal landscapes featuring floating pink orbs to the natural world beyond the gallery, each view enhancing the other.

I’d never experienced an art gallery with so much natural light before, and Hagan explained how the light shifts through the day, as well as with the seasons. You could visit the gallery many times and each experience would be subtly different. I plan to do just that. 

Categories
Arts Culture

All the joys of life

Art historian Lyn Bolen Warren founded Les Yeux du Monde gallery and made immeasurable contributions to Charlottesville’s contemporary art scene. Supplied photo

The Charlottesville arts community lost one of its greatest champions and brightest stars in Carolyn “Lyn” Bolen Warren, who died on Sunday, November 21, at the age of 60 after a valiant battle with cancer.

Warren’s art gallery, Les Yeux du Monde, has been a cherished Charlottesville institution for more than two decades, featuring beautifully curated and thought-provoking shows with work by both established and emerging artists.

Warren opened the gallery in 1995, after receiving her Ph.D. in art history from UVA. In those days, Charlottesville’s arts scene looked very different than it does now—Second Street Gallery, McGuffey and UVA were the only public venues to view art. At first, Warren operated out of her stylish contemporary home just north of town on Wolf Trap Road. Though she moved the gallery into Charlottesville, first to West Main Street and then to The Terraces, just off the Downtown Mall, LYdM eventually returned to its original Wolf Trap setting in 2009, this time situated in a striking building designed by esteemed architect WG Clark. Like all of Warren’s choices, the building is both structure and sculpture, reflecting her imagination and vision.

Whether you were an important client, an artist, or a casual visitor, Warren was equally welcoming. Her passion was art, and her life’s work was sharing that passion. She reveled in the world of ideas and devoted enormous amounts of energy to community outreach, with artists’ talks and trips to studios and museums. She was also generous with her time and resources, supporting artists and collaborating with other organizations like UVA and Second Street Gallery.

“She was a beloved member of the arts community, who is now a kind of icon,” says artist and UVA studio art professor Dean Dass. “What she accomplished here is almost unbelievable.”

Among her many accomplishments, “Hindsight/Fore-site: Art for the New Millennium,” was perhaps the most ambitious. Warren conceived and curated the NEA- funded show and the accompanying publication, “Siting Jefferson,” for the UVA museum in 2000. The exhibition featured over 20 artists including luminaries such as Ann Hamilton, Michael Mercil, Dennis Oppen­heim, and Agnes Denes, whose site-specific work was presented around Charlottesville.

Always gracious and accommodating, Warren moved through the world with an innate elegance. She was full of good cheer and enthusiasm, and was exceedingly kind. She was also uncompromising in terms of the high standards and strong convictions she held, and she helped make contemporary art an active public discourse in Charlottesville.

“We came up in the department together,” says Dass, who joined the UVA faculty at about the same time as Warren began working on her degree. “My wife Patsy put it so well—‘Lyn was not an art historian, she was an art history maker. She affected the careers of many artists and brought Charlottesville to a better place in understanding how to make art a part of life.’”

Warren and Victoria Beck Newman co-directed the Lydia Csato Gasman Archives for Picasso and Modernist Studies. “Lyn and I wrote our dissertations under the legendary Picasso scholar, Lydia Gasman, who maintained that modern art should often be viewed as a quest for a new sacred that was relevant to contemporary existence,” says Newman. “As a brilliant art historian and gallerist, Lyn endorsed that idea by exhibiting and writing about art that had a transformational impact on both viewers and culture. Her deep understanding of art history underlay the authoritative and serious choices she made as a curator.”

Deftly balancing her career with family life, Warren raised two children, Hagan and Ray, by her first husband, Eugene Ray Rushton, who died in 2004. She wed artist Russ Warren in 2005; theirs was a true marriage of the minds. Warren’s warmth and passion brought dozens of others into her fold.

UVA art professor David Summers, who likens Warren to a daughter, sums up her beautiful, enduring spirit. “Lyn completed her art-historical studies with the conviction that art is an unmixed good, not just a reminder of the woes of life, and not just an illusion that makes life bearable,” he says, “but something more like love, spring, and sunshine, all the joys of life, to which we might reasonably think we have a right, and by which she seemed herself to be carried along and sustained.”

Categories
Arts Culture

Both sides of joy

Russ Warren painted his way through the last 14 months of pandemic quarantine, resulting in his new show “The Disciple” at Les Yeux du Monde through May 16. Image courtesy of the artist

By Sarah Sargent

A sense of joy permeates Russ Warren’s “The Disciple” at Les Yeux du Monde. The feeling comes from the jazzy Tex-Mex inflected palette—fiery reds and oranges, slicker yellow and bright turquoise—Warren favors. But it’s also conveyed by the sense of humor, surrealist flourishes, and simple, almost childlike forms that inhabit Warren’s particular brand of figurative abstraction.

Nearly all the work in the exhibition was created over the past two years, and much of it touches on COVID-19. There’s an amusing portrait of an appalled looking Dr. Fauci, mouth agape and surrounded by floating viruses. The subject is serious, but Warren puts his own wry spin on it.

“Deep into August” is another matter. A rare departure in its grim intensity, the triptych was painted when the pandemic was settling in and the future looked pretty bleak. “I was getting really tired of COVID,” Warren says. “I’d thought it would be gone by then, but it was in full force. I was working on each panel individually, sitting outside on a terrace where wrought iron furniture was casting these weird, threatening shadows. It was spooky and intense. The first panel is the pandemic going on, the center one, it’s letting up, and then boom, back to the pandemic.”

By contrast, “Pineapple Ascending” offers hope with its rising symbol of hospitality and welcome, the promise of future interactions with other people.

A Houston native, Warren grew up surrounded by a combination of Mexican influences and cowboy culture. Visiting his father’s office in the Southwest Bank towers as a boy, Warren was dazzled by an enormous mural in the lobby by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo. “It was the first real art I’d ever seen and it became my idea of what art should be,” he says.

Like any good Texas boy, Warren helped out at his family’s cattle ranch. That legacy is commemorated in a series of works on paper that he has been producing for many years. They feature line drawings of bulls and horses placed against a field of sumptuous color, and Warren titles them by number using Roman numerals, which he places on the animals’ rumps like brands. For the background, he uses liquid acrylic and livestock markers, applied and then scraped away, creating a rich, subtly mottled effect.

“My family used to be a cattle family, in a real small way,” says Warren. “And they used to brand everything. So from the time I was a little boy I was involved and, whoo—the branding was horrific! The Roman numeral brands and the livestock marker are pictorial devices that also reference Texas and this personal history.”

Other artists figure prominently in Warren’s work. He’s co-opted the dots of Picasso and Braque Synthetic Cubism to mute down or heighten a field of color, provide surface variations, or represent things like stars. Warren is also drawn to pattern and texture, working stripes and scumbles into his picture planes. In “Oh Tamayo,” he mixes crushed glass beads into acrylic medium and black pigment to create a lustrous tarry background. The painting includes a collaged newspaper thought bubble in the body of the animal, meant to convey its frustration at not being able to communicate.

“Queen Anne’s Revenge” features a mound of skulls, bones, and other body parts, rendered in bulbous Dubuffet fashion with red and green outlines against a field of black. “‘Queen Anne’s Revenge’ sounds Dylanesque, which being a huge Bob Dylan fan, I like,” says Warren. “It’s an homage to the South Carolina Coast where we go often. Edward Teach, a.k.a Blackbeard, hid out there; Queen Anne’s Revenge was his ship.”

The commanding visage of “The Disciple” is fractured into two distinct expressions. The left side appears alert and interested, while the right is affectless and blank. The two sides meet in the lower part of the face with the slightly pursed lipstick-red mouth. The bold palette pairs a rose and moss green background with black, white, and yellow ochre defining the head. “The disciple is me,” says Warren. “And the mentor was painter Earl Staley.” The two had a friendly yet competitive relationship that Warren feels was important to his development as an artist. “Things kind of went south during the painting process, and the figure switched to become more androgynous. It came together so fast, I never thought it would become one of my favorite paintings.”

A series of small sketches reveal a bit about Warren’s working process and also showcase his line—something you don’t notice in his paintings. “I have different sketch books,” Warren says. “Some are for pen and ink, others for watercolor. I work in one or the other every day. It’s like a third cup of coffee. I’ll go into my studio, do one, let it dry, turn the page and do another. It limbers me up and affects my line and my mark and everything.”

But the joy in the sketches, and that of the paintings, is tempered with the weight of reality—of being human. We get glimpses of this in the memento mori skulls, the specter of COVID, the branding references, the expanses of black that pervade certain works. These things bring an elegiac quality that gives depth and resonance to work that at first seems so simple and so sunny.

Categories
Arts Culture

Bright explorations: David Summers’ uplifting tribute to light at Les Yeux du Monde

A close look at David Summers’ “Mondrian’s Recycling” reveals the whimsical way the painting pays homage to the geometric abstract style of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. Courtesy of the artist

A Renaissance man as well as a Renaissance scholar, David Summers uses his vast knowledge to explore light physically and from a philosophical standpoint. “David Summers: Nothing but Light” at Les Yeux du Monde examines the artist’s continued preoccupation with the visual topic that has been at the center of his artistic output for decades.

“There’s one thing I should tell you about the paintings,” says Summers, pausing for effect. “You’re supposed to like them.” He chuckles. “They’re supposed to be likable.”

Summers is the Emeritus William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art Theory and Italian Renaissance Art at UVA. He is also an author whose works include Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, and The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics.

“David Summers is that rare art historian who can also paint,” says Les Yeux du Monde Director Lyn Warren. “He draws on his broad knowledge to create glorious paintings that hide unexpected treasures.”

Summers is also known to augment his work with historical, mythological, or other erudite references. His “Net of Indra” series takes its name from an ancient Buddhist allegory that deals with the concept of interconnectedness or emptiness (of a separate self/ego). The net stretches out infinitely above the dwelling of the god Indra. Within each mesh rhombus of the net, a single jewel glitters. All the other jewels are reflected in this one jewel and are also reflecting all the other jewels, ultimately resulting in an infinite ricocheting of reflections within the net. Summers may be making a statement about the interconnection of all things, but it’s the behavior of light that’s particularly relevant to his work. Capturing, with his brush, light glinting off reflective surfaces appears to be one of the artist’s greatest challenges and joys.

Indra’s net figures prominently in the show with four paintings referencing it. “Play of Light in the Net of Indra (Two Blue Pitchers)” is a work of hue, light, and texture. “Fragment of the Net of Indra (Night)” is equally arresting, and “Still Life with Sunrise” thrums with shimmering energy. The outer edges of the painting, where pink underpainting is visible peeking out from beneath the background, tells us a bit about Summers’ process, while creating a quietly beautiful effect. 

“Play of Light in the Net of Indra (Two Blue Pitchers)” Image courtesy of the artist

“Mondrian’s Recycling” pays homage to the Dutch modernist with subtlety and humor. Summers creates an alluring image of cool verdancy in his arrangement of glass objects, mostly blue, green and clear, placed on a table top and its lower shelf. This setup is in front of a window through which a hedge of trees is visible. Thanks to the title, we detect how the outlines of the window, wall, and table cleverly produce a version of Mondrian’s iconic grid formation. It’s a light touch that could have gone unnoticed. Another droll art reference—a deadpan jab at Jeff Koons’ vacuous, overly merchandised output—is dropped into “Still Life with Million-Dollar Balloon Dog.”

“Big Still Life with Mirrors, Homage to van Eyck (For D.W.)” has an interesting backstory. A friend of Summers’, D.W. presented him with a convex mirror similar to the one prominently featured in Jan van Eyck’s “The Arnolfini Portrait.”

Van Eyck has special significance to Summers as a prominent member of the early northern Renaissance school of painting whose developments in the use of oil paint were hugely influential. In addition to falling within his purview of study, Summers relies on the medium van Eyck perfected to create his own transparent glazes. These are fundamental to his oeuvre as they enable Summers to render glass and produce reflections.

In Summers’ painting, the convex van Eyck mirror is surrounded by other mirrors, including, amusingly, a rearview mirror that sits insouciantly at the bottom of the pile. There are also clear glass balls (Japanese fishing net floats), tin cans, and a vase. As in the original van Eyck, you can just make out the artist’s reflection in the convex mirror.

“Commodity Ghosts Dancing in the Sun” references our disposable culture with a row of plastic seltzer bottles—the ghosts of commodity—set against a patterned background. Summers reveals the beauty and humor in these throw-away items, and they, in turn, provide a nice edginess that contrasts with the refined polish of Summers’ execution. To balance Summers’ paintings of objects, interior and garden scenes and a series of enchanting vignettes from the Chesapeake Bay that evoke the best days of high summer are also included in the show.

“Do you remember the Shmoo from ‘Li’l Abner’?,” asks Summers. “It was a lovable little creature, that was any flavor you liked when you ate it. These paintings are like that. The subject matter is really light, I want it to be light. But the arbitrariness of the things is supposed to be slightly humorous—slightly humorous in the way somebody you like is.”

Categories
Arts

Inspired recollections: Dean Dass’ stylistic parallels on view at Les Yeux du Monde

Dean Dass brings a variety of influences to his show “Venus and the Moon” at Les Yeux du Monde gallery through December 29. “Chippewa Falls” captures Dass’ affinity for Canadian landscape painters The Group of Seven. Image courtesy the artist

A professor of printmaking at UVA, where he has taught since 1985, Dean Dass began painting 20 years ago, with the process-rich, methodical approach of a printmaker. “Dean Dass: Venus and the Moon” at Les Yeux du Monde marks the artist’s 10th solo show at the gallery, and he continues to work in both disciplines.

Looking at the show, two styles of work are immediately apparent. There are the evocative paintings that capture so perfectly the effects of light and atmosphere on the landscape. And then there are the more stylized works that feature abstract shapes and heavily worked surfaces.

Dass produced the landscapes following a trip through northern Michigan and Ontario that paralleled one taken by The Group of Seven, a cohort of Canadian landscape painters, active between 1920 and 1933. Like Dass, the Seven shared an affinity for the rugged beauty of the north as well as an appreciation of the work of Nordic artists like Edvard Munch, Jonas Heiska, and Akseli Gallen-Kallela.

“Fireflies,” “Figure in Space,” “Seven Clouds,” and “Flower,” are representative of the other strain, revisiting images Dass initially used in collages and prints produced 25 years ago that were first exhibited in a 2001 show he did at Galleria Harmonia in Jyväskylä, Finland entitled “Räjähdyksiä Maisemassa” (“Landscape with Explosions”). The works were inspired by screen shots of the video games his children were playing at the time, as well as sci-fi film stills. You never know when inspiration will strike and these small, seemingly insignificant and rather eccentric images have provided a wealth of fodder for Dass over the years.

Dass takes a profoundly cerebral approach to his practice, incorporating history, mythology, and philosophy into the work. This may help explain why he sees his entire output as closely aligned. It’s true, even his most abstract works are rooted in nature—the titles: “Clouds,” “Fireflies,” “Flower,” and “Explosions” tell you this. And he goes further, incorporating nature directly into the works, using such organic materials as graphite, gold leaf, and mica. Even the washes of pigment that pervade the work have a connection, recalling the “impossibly pink” rock formations Dass encountered in Canada.

Working with intention, but also leaving a good deal up to chance, Dass embraces both new and old media and techniques. He uses the same glazes that northern Renaissance artists employed and mixes his own pigments at the same time that he takes inspiration from computer and TV screen images, while availing himself of an inkjet printer.

With its heavily worked, almost excavated quality and dynamic abstract form, “Figure in Space” seems both ancient and contemporary, flat and three-dimensional. Rendered in gold leaf, the figure of the title, with its knobby, splayed “arms,” has a kinetic quality and it seems to be floating or spinning. Its scale is unclear, it could be molecular, or some giant extraterrestrial body.

Displayed in the back room of the gallery are a series of small, mixed-media works on paper, most of which incorporate printmaking techniques. These charming, often amusing, odd pieces are appealing both aesthetically and on account of the quirkiness of their subject matter. Particular favorites are “Astronaut,” produced in collaboration with Jyrki Markkanen, the memento mori, “The King!” from 1995, “Four Tents,” and “Camping in the Clouds.”

Dass’ paintings of downy woodpeckers are remarkably evocative. There’s no bird body there, just an arrangements of brushstrokes and pigments. They’re like deconstructed birds, but they deftly emulate the soft feathers, distinct markings, and essential birdiness of their subjects.

“Etna Highlands” and the smaller, looser “Frozen Bog Etna Highlands” present the same scene of woods and water in winter. The paintings are modest in terms of subject matter and palette, and yet, they ring true thanks to the way Dass creates the light of the setting sun. And it’s not just that the apricot hue is spot on, but the way Dass replicates sunlight filtering through the woods—its soft intangibility, the way the air can make it seem blurred, and the spots of brightness near the horizon that occur under certain atmospheric conditions.

“Birch Near Superior” displays a similar combination of modesty and virtuosity. Here, Dass uses precise daubs of paint in the foreground, giving over to elongated blurs in the background, to capture the visual effect of wind through leaves. The overall palette is quite somber, but even with very little, Dass conveys the sparkling quality of the day with dots of yellow pigment on the birch leaves, a couple of white reflections, and a small patch of blue sky.

In the glorious “Bog Near Sault Ste. Marie,” we see both the technique—the brushstrokes, rubbed areas, and squiggles that are brilliant stand-alone passages of pure abstract painting—and also the illusion, the movement of the trees and the sunlight dancing on water that they evoke.

Dass’ images of pristine nature are deeply moving. We appreciate their beauty, but we also recognize how very fragile they are, especially today when so much is under assault. And this gets at a fundamental objective for Dass, namely, a two-pronged reaction to the work, where there is always something implied beyond the explicit.

There is the beauty of the image, but then something more primal, more weighty, and possibly quite melancholy creeps in. German philosopher Theodor Adorno, whom Dass greatly admires, refers to this as a “shudder.” It catches you off guard and engenders a deepened appreciation of what you are looking at. In Dass’ work, the shudder Adorno refers to may take different forms, but it is always there.

Dean Dass brings a variety of influences to his show “Venus and the Moon” at Les Yeux du Monde gallery through December 29.

Categories
Arts

Land here now: Les Yeux du Monde challenges traditions of landscape art

Anne Chesnut’s collage is included in Les Yeux du Monde’s “Landscape Re-Imagined,” an exhibition of 27 local artists offering perspectives on the lay of the land through August 11. Courtesy of the artist.

In the Anthropocene, what does it mean to paint the landscape? Pristine, unspoiled wilderness no longer exists (even places that look “untouched” are affected by climate change),  and we’ve learned to cast a suspicious eye at bucolic pastoral zones, now that we know how often they involve Roundup runoff and soil erosion. This isn’t meant to harsh anyone’s plein-air buzz; it’s just reality, and one that Lyn Bolen Warren, director of Les Yeux du Monde, readily acknowledges.

“It’s just such a crucial time now for the Earth,” she says. “It’s disappearing in the way we knew it before.”

When she found herself putting together a group landscape show to hang at Les Yeux this summer, she titled it “Landscape Re-Imagined”—a nod to the genre’s weighty history as well as to the urgent need for humans, whether artists or not, to reframe our view of the planet.

The show, which includes work by 38 artists, surveys many different conceptions of landscape. There’s land itself, and then there’s landscape—an artifact of a distinctly human endeavor, one that does rest on imagining, a la Warren’s title. When we picture the land, we’re making choices to see it in a certain way, and a show with this kind of range invites us to step back and ask the meta-questions.

Take, for example, the difference between Priscilla Long Whitlock’s canvas “Reflections, Mirrored Marks,” and Isabelle Abbot’s “Spring Fling.” The first seems to immerse the viewer in a body of water—as though our heads were just above the surface, gazing through Whitlock’s suggestive brushstrokes in space—and the second positions us at some high viewpoint, the sea a distant band of blue. These are not just different places to stand; they imply different ways of being, one as an intimate of the land, one as its commander and surveyor.

Yet as we move through the show, an even deeper sense of possibility emerges. The simple act of including houses in a “landscape” painting, as in Ann Lyne’s “The Smiths, Lexington, VA,” reminds us that even in town, nature is present. To take this a step further, we might ask whether our dwellings are part of nature just like bird’s nests and anthills. If that seems obvious (on the one hand) or simplistic (on the other), consider all the contexts in which wilderness images are still de rigueur. There is a certain view of nature as not-human to which we remain firmly attached.

There are material choices, too, that push the traditional boundaries of landscape art. Molly Herman’s piece is subtly sculptural, with woven fabrics incorporated onto its painted surface. Just barely 3D, the piece—at least in the context of this show—invites us to reflect on our habitual conversion of land, which has depth and surrounds us, to a flat representation that we regard as separate.

Dorothy Robinson’s “Full House” takes the legacy of, say, van Gogh and refracts it into a postmodern space where floral fragments are adulterated by abstract sweeps of color and brushwork. Accustomed to single-point perspective, our eyes may find Robinson’s realm disordered, but in truth it’s a realist depiction of how any landscape artwork is a fiction of sorts, an impermanent gambit—someone’s mind and eye at work. Anne Chesnut’s quilt-like multimedia collage of images gathered on a drive between Crozet and White Hall is another kind of personal landscape view: the eye that’s an I.

Importantly, the works of David Hawkins and Richard Crozier focus on the built (and in Crozier’s case, the post-industrial) environment. Carefully representing streets, buildings, vehicles—and including such images in a landscape show—might be one of the deepest ways to re-imagine inherited ideas about how we picture land. After all, if we insist only on all-natural beauty, we’ll ignore most of what the world offers to our seeing.

The scraped, paved site in Crozier’s piece, “Monticello Dairy Demolition,” shares some DNA with the sculpture outside by UVA Aunspaugh fellow Charles Lambert: a concrete-and-rebar form that hovers between rubble and transcendence. Titled “Quiet,” it’s made of materials we tend to completely disregard. Yet here it is, inviting us to stand and be present with it and the dizzy view from the Les Yeux lawn.

It’s entirely appropriate that this landscape show has an outdoor sculpture component. One emerges from the building and engages, via many senses, the place that had been framed by its large windows. And in these outdoor works, human beings appear—the figures that, in the paintings indoors, had been only implied.

Categories
Arts

Inner realities: Les Yeux du Monde reconnects the imaginary worlds of Ed Haddaway and Russ Warren

Ed Haddaway's "An Even Larger and More Important Animal" draws influence from his time spent studying in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Photo courtesy Les Yeux du Monde

Winter gray getting you down? Les Yeux du Monde offers a potent dose of Southwestern heat in the form of paintings by Russ Warren and sculptures by Ed Haddaway that will banish those February blues.

The two artists, who are native Texans, met as students at the University of New Mexico in 1971, where they forged a friendship based on similar experiences and outlooks. Rejecting the abstraction then in vogue, they hankered instead for art that, as Warren puts it, showed the “touch of man.” Following graduation, Haddaway remained in Albuquerque. Warren moved east and the two lost touch. After a painting career that included teaching at Davidson College in North Carolina, Warren married Les Yeux du Monde director Lyn Warren, and settled in Charlottesville. Warren and Haddaway reconnected a couple of years ago, and realized that despite being separated by time and distance, they had been pursuing remarkably similar tracks all along.

“I chose ‘Surrealities’ as the title,” says Lyn Warren. “Because both Russ and Ed are interested in depicting imaginary worlds that evoke deeper truths. They value chance, humor, dream, and inner realities over external ones, and in similar fashion to the original surrealists of the 1920s, they favor the irrational over the solely rational, opting for a magical, dream-like, or humorous alternative.”

The surrealists were reacting to World War I and the instability and turmoil that followed. Finding their reality untenable, they rejected it, turning inward to their subconscious for inspiration. Warren and Haddaway came of age in a similarly chaotic time, at the height of the Vietnam War. Their work also rejects reality even as it retains a profound connection to its Southwestern surroundings.

Haddaway resists having his work labeled as “childlike.” It’s a tall order, given the bright colors, fanciful creatures, exuberant gumbo of shapes and underlying humor that permeates the work. But for Haddaway they are the creatures and objects that inhabit his imagination and visit his dreams. Thinking of them within the context of New Mexico, one can begin to see associations. In Native American mythology it wouldn’t be unusual for a man to be in conversation with a wolf as in “Meeting Mr. Wolf,” or for something like “An Even Larger and More Important Animal” to exist. The hand festooning the animal’s tail is both an ancient symbol and a humorous salute to the viewer.

In Haddaway’s larger works, the scale and color command attention, but he is able to sustain the interest in smaller works like “Click Clack Moon Metaphor” and “Wee House in the Forest.” A series of oxidized pieces, which seem made from organic matter, strike a subtler note. Haddaway’s monotypes are really appealing with their sophisticated palette and commanding, almost brutish gestures. The abbreviated images he produces are witty, edgily charming, and, yes, evoke Picasso.

Russ Warren, “Still Life with Curtains, 2018.” Image courtesy Les Yeux du Monde

You can tell that Warren revels in painting. The richness of the color, the texture, the energy, all convey a marked sensuality. Warren uses interactive acrylic paint to achieve a quality similar to the effect of oil, whisking the paint vigorously before he uses it. This creates bubbles that pop when applied, adding depth and texture to the work.

Warren’s recurring iconography has great personal meaning. There’s his dog Zeke, hit by a car shortly before his best friend was killed in a car crash that is both an homage to the adored pet and a stand-in for the friend. Guitars (Warren is a talented player) and other stringed instruments are represented, along with apples and half a watermelon.

Picasso and Cubism, in particular, are major influences. Warren is drawn to the fracturing of space that makes several views of an object visible at once, and the colorful flatness, simple shapes and use of dots that pervade his work are hallmarks of synthetic cubism. Take for instance “Still Life with Curtains,” a dynamic composition of abstract shapes with an arrangement of objects in front. The guitar, watermelon, and apples are all there, along with Zeke, curled up under the table. Here the dots not only add visual interest, they also veer into narrative, representing stars in the sky and watermelon seeds.

“The Ready Jester” reveals Warren’s eye for composition and color. The masks are Mexican, not African, with Day of the Dead connotations, and the turquoise, yellow, and orange evoke a southern border aesthetic. Horses and cows, a cat, and perhaps Zeke, are jumbled together to form a semblance of “Guernica” without the horror. On the left side, the background is a solid, smooth opaque, on the right, Warren introduces red and allows the brushstrokes to show.

A welcome seasonal respite full of joyful, eye-popping work, “Surrealities” also comes with a delightful backstory that speaks to the endurance of friendship and the power of personal convictions.

“Surrealities: The Art of Ed Haddaway and Russ Warren” is on view at Les Yeux du Monde through March 10. 

Categories
Arts

Annie Harris Massie invites contemplation at Les Yeux du Monde

Annie Harris Massie’s new works capture the subtleties of color and light played over area landscapes in paintings such as “Cobalt Crossing into the Pond.” Image courtesy of the artist

“No matter what her subject, whether it’s her own yard, landscapes, or those magnified close ups of the viburnum or hydrangea,” says Les Yeux du Monde Gallery Director Lyn Warren about Annie Harris Massie, “They’re all bathed in light that unifies them, abstracts them and de-materializes them.”

In addition to her virtuosity at capturing light, Massie has a particular mastery of conveying the time of year. You’d never mistake “Sycamores Above Possum Creek, Spring, Lone Jack Farm”, for anything other than a vernal scene. It’s in the lemony cast to the light, the tender salmon of the earth, and the bright dashes of green. This painting has a remarkable quality of stillness. It invites contemplation. Massie’s paintings demand that you spend time with them analyzing how she utilizes the formal elements to create the images and effects that she does. A potent spirituality runs through Massie’s work, but this piece feels like a quiet visual devotional exalting the spiritual quality of nature.

Though Massie uses a subdued palette overall, she has an eye for color. “Cobalt Crossing into the Pond,” a luminous painting of water and vegetation, is a prime example of this. You see an astonishing blue on even the muddiest of ponds on a clear day, and to recreate it on the canvas is no easy feat. The effect of the painting is placid, but the surface is enlivened with ruffling strokes of white, blue, and gray, which convey reflections and also the tremulous quality of water. Around the top edge we see reflections of trees and at the bottom, in shadow, a gestural passage of darker blues and gray squiggles. To form the twiggy bush on the left, Massie applies the paint in a complex network of strokes that vary from the sketchy lines of the outer branches to the more fully realized center ones. Thick daubs of grayish white represent the light peeping though the gaps. It’s a quiet, unprepossessing scene, but in Massie’s hands, it is elevated to something much more.

“Flattening into Bedford County, Early Fall” is a classic Piedmont vista of farmland stretching to the distant Blue Ridge Mountains. Massie constructs the background with fuzzy lines of grayish paint forming the trees that divide the ocher fields, a thin smear of spring green, the mountains bathed in haze except for two smalls points of intense blue that suggest the sun is hitting there, while smudges of clouds dapple the sky. This portion is beautifully rendered and easily overshadowed by the foreground where the stand of yellow maples catches your attention and the brushwork and color sense shine in the snarl of mauve, purple, tan, gray, and black brushstrokes of the trees below.

“Snowy View from Allied Arts Building” is an aerial cityscape of Lynchburg with a dramatically flattened perspective. In the foreground, the roofs of the buildings form a striking rhythm of rectangular and triangular planes. The snow that blankets them provides a surface for Massie to showcase her eye for light and color. Snow is a challenging and alluring subject for painters. Here the shadows are composed of shades of ecru, gray, and blue. Massie uses blue to denote not only shadows, but windows reflecting sky, with the color contributing to the overall bluish cast of the work that places it squarely in late afternoon. Again, her brushwork is dazzling, a riot of jumbled strokes that magically coalesce to form a city street and the feeling of a snowy day. They also communicate the close quarters and bustle of the urban landscape observed from a less commercial area, with the stark geometry in the foreground giving way to a densely embellished background. This pull between representational and abstract calls to mind Richard Diebenkorn’s cityscapes from the early 1960s.

“Viburnum in the Afternoon” isn’t so much a portrait of a shrub as an evocation of being in a garden. Massie places the viewer so close to the bush as to be enveloped by it. She’s showing, not telling, and it is so effective you can almost smell the heady fragrance of the blossoms. It’s a beautiful painting, its weight and presence evenly distributed across the entire canvas. The flowers are mere suggestions and read like blurred points of light. Color describes depth, and the modulating values record shifts from the shadows at the bottom to the sun-struck top. The overall scheme—basically green and white, but actually composed of a number of other hues—is broken in just a few places by the introduction of pale blue representing sky. The eye is drawn to strokes of blue and white that create several stunning passages within the work.

The experience of being outside at different times of the year and hours of the day is Massie’s focus; while she clearly has an attachment to the subjects she depicts, they are subordinate to the intangibles of light, temporality, and mood, and the purely formal considerations of painting. Her work transcends the genre of landscape and still-life painting to become something spiritual. It urges us to pause and contemplate both nature and the sublime manner in which it is being portrayed.

“Annie Harris Massie: New Paintings in Oil and Encaustic”

Les Yeux du Monde

Through December 30