A congregation in brick, stone, iron, and glass: Nathalie Kalbach's “Hello Old Friends”
Around the corner from where I’m sitting, there’s a row house on a residential block. To a motorist blowing by, it probably looks unremarkable. It always catches my eye, though.
The house set a few yards back from the concrete facade of the tenement to its immediate north, recessed like a Buddha of Bamiyan. Then there’s its bay window, which accommodates two panels facing the street rather than one. Around the wrought iron guardrails of the stone front steps, the owners wind whatever is in season: faerie lights for the summer, holly and ivy vines for Christmas. I’m not sure what our local real estate appraisers would say about the place, but there’s one thing I do know, and I think about it whenever I see it: Nat Kalbach would appreciate this. Nat Kalbach would understand what it is about this assembly of mundane architectural features that sings to my soul.
With pen and brush, she might capture it in one of her notebooks. Later on, it might become a painting, exhaustively researched (for all of of Kalbach’s paintings are researched, and annotated) and set in dialogue with her many other Jersey City streetscapes, and the Jersey City street itself. If you’ve ever been struck dumb with wonder by the beauty of a city block, or danced internally to the rhythms in the architecture, or caught the mysterious shape of the midday shadows on the sidewalk and knew, without a doubt, that you could never quit this place, you owe it to yourself to check out “If These Walls Could Talk,” a Kalbach solo show that will hang at Novado Gallery (110 Morgan St.) until the end of the month.
“Walls” follows Kalbach’s early 2024 solo show at the Museum of Jersey City History, a venue that suited the artist's antiquarian spirit. That show was unalloyed edutainment: cheerfully colored images of city buildings important and obscure, accompanied by exquisitely written artist notes on the provenance of the design features of her subjects. Kalbach has brought her thick description to Novado Gallery, but “If These Walls Could Talk” is less of a lesson than its predecessor was. This time around, the artist is not quite as interested in how Jersey City was made as she is in how Jersey City makes us feel.
What characterizes Kalbach’s Jersey City is narrative generosity. The town makes itself legible, to her and to us, through its physical characteristics. Her city is a book open to all with eyes to read it — its language inscribed in cracks and creases, overhands and pathways, tall walls and tenement windows, shop signs, wire loops, chain links and fire escapes. The story is one of ambition, imagination, social mobility, and the persistent desire to express ourselves through the objects with which we interact.
Power, windows: "Tune Out the Noise"
Understanding where we are on the street is often a kind of triage: we’ve got to apprehend our surroundings, grasp the important stuff, and ignore the rest. In “Tune Out the Noise,” Kalbach gives us a city where the flimsiest line of communication between neighbors is more memorable, and therefore more important, than the fanciest motor vehicle. Wires slung across a residential street form a safety net for the sky. Cables loop like bobbins in front of windows blazing with electric light. A telephone pole that looks like a cross sanctifies the entire block. Meanwhile, the painter gets to enact every urbanist’s fantasy by whiting out the cars parked along the sidewalk. The escape they promise is unnecessary: this neighborhood is connected and self-sufficient. It doesn’t merely encourage walking. It also encourages talking.
In other pieces, Kalbach doesn’t even give the cars a chance to spoil the picture. In “Downtown 1,” she crops her streetside image just below the awnings of the stores. Freed from the obligation to pay attention to ground-level happenstance, we can concentrate on the measured but competitive way in which old buildings converse. Arched windows, friezes, and cornices on the façade of one edifice feel like riffs on the appearance of its neighbors. Builders attempt to one-up each other: oh, so you’re going three stories?, well, mine will be three and a half with an ornamental peak on the roof.
Similar but not the same: "The Archive Next Door"
Residents get in on the action, too. Kalbach’s “The Archive Next Door” demonstrates how tiny variations in similar designs make a street feel like a lived in-place. This is the neighborhood as a repository for stories of individual strivers, each urban life following its own trajectory between aspiration and achievement. Her use of an acrylic palette — baby aspirin pink, rhododendron rose, Caribbean Sea teal, and other Easter egg-dipping tones not usually seen on Jersey City streets — makes her subjects feel approachable, but they also help magnify the marks of personality that make city buildings such telling artifacts. With pastel powder, Kalbach is dusting the city for clues.
And much like a detective, Kalbach doesn’t have much interest in shadow. The most she ever dabbles in darkness is in “The Butler Way,” a portrait of the hulking former warehouse that now contains the Modera Lofts (and Novado Gallery). She acknowledges the gloom in the recesses between the three great arms of the building, but she’s more intrigued by the face that the building shows the street.
The Modera Lofts, sort of: "The Butler Way"
When she’s really feeling affectionate toward her subject, she turns on the sun and lets it burn away anything that might obscure the delivery of visual meaning and architectural significance. In “Hello Old Friends,” it may as well be high noon, as six townhouses are enveloped by a pink sky. They look like they’ve fused together like crayons in the sun. Reading the street from left to right is like encountering one of those cartoon posters that traces the progress of human evolution from our humble origins in the forest to our current self-regard. Each building stunts a little harder than its neighbor on the left. At the edge of the frame is a handsome but utilitarian brownstone. By the time we reach the intersection, we’re confronted by a building decked out with ornamental chimneys, a peaked European-style roof, and grand bay windows ringed with wrought iron. Kalbach subtly tips her image forward to underscore the centrality of the house on the corner. Even the tenements in the distance, their little black dot-like windows agape, look on with respect at the majesty of the block’s star performer.
Does all this chronicling of urban vanity contain a critique? Certainly. Kalbach isn’t above poking gentle fun at the capitalist’s taste for things baroque. Yet she loves this place way too much to demolish its pretensions. She seems to see the builders of our oldest standing structures and the inhabitants of the houses they made as people making a good faith effort to reach beyond themselves — maybe toward the heavens, maybe toward power and a big pile of money, but in any case toward something more than what they were.
Son, take a good look around: "Early Monday Morning"
More importantly, she’s keenly aware of the tendency of castles to crumble. Nat Kalbach’s color fields are bright and even, but her lines are deliberately shaky. She’s fond of putting thin slashes in her brickface and giving her fenestration a sketchlike quality. Sometimes they knot up liked barbed wire, or fray like a thread in a tapestry. Like an architect, she’s dealing in the hypothetical — and hypothetically, one of the things that could happen is that all of these buildings could come crashing to the ground.
In the fascinating “Early Monday Morning,” signs of transition are all over the streetscape. Lights are on, and the row of businesses is ready to receive customers, but at least one of the front windows is boarded up and covered with graffiti. Some of the shared bicycles have been taken, but not all of them, and the different colored shades on the windows speak of the transience of the occupants. The arrow on the street sign on the corner guides the depicted pedestrians away from the strip and toward points unknown.
“The Invitation” makes Kalbach’s anxiety more explicit. In this painting of the entrance to a city brownstone, the little pin-line cracks are everywhere: on the paneled windows of the doors, along the painted jamb, on the ornamental banner, in the smoothed concrete of the steps. The relaxed opulence of the architecture is apparent, but so is the fragility of the scene. None of this is permanent. This story is in a constant state of revision, and whether it’s a happy one or a tragedy is up to the latest writers to grab the pen in a the long relay race of urban history. That means you and me, and everybody else engaged in the curatorial work of looking, chronicling, appreciating, and remembering.
(Novado Gallery is open from 11 a.m. until 7 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and noon until 7 p.m. on Saturdays.)
Tris McCall regularly writes about visual art (and other topics) for NJArts.net, Jersey City Times, and other independent publications. He's also written for the Newark Star-Ledger, Jersey Beat, the Jersey City Reporter, the Jersey Journal, the Jersey City Independent, Inside Jersey, and New Jersey dot com. He also writes about things that have no relevance to New Jersey. Not today, though.
Eye Level is an online journal dedicated to visual art in Jersey City, New Jersey. A new review will appear every Tuesday morning at 8 a.m., and there'll be intermittent commentaries posted to the site in between those reviews.
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