Take me to the river: Lex Heilijgers's "Basin"
Suddenly, the galleries in the Garden State are suffused with sunshine. The big ball of fire in the sky has gotten down to business, and curators have been keen to pick pieces that reflect the effects of the rising mercury. Galerie Lucida in Red Bank — a favorite among Jersey City artists — launched a summer-themed show. In McGinley Square, the curators at Crema assembled their own crew for a visual commentary on the warm months; Project Greenville mounted a group show dedicated to representations of parks and greenspace; Drawing Rooms switched on an aesthetic equivalent of lightbox therapy with an exhibition that celebrated the color yellow. Art spaces have become tanning mirrors, capturing light and refracting rays toward our retinas.
Why are we staring at the sun? Isn’t it hot enough out there? A JC Fridays roundup of citywide art shows revealed a powerful undercurrent of defiance in all of these verdant idylls: flowers designed to be slipped into the barrels of guns, femininity directed at masculine imperatives, peace signs thrown at hard times. The rest of the world may be dead set on harshness. We will guard our gardens and serve as gentle counterexamples. Because we know that all summers are, in some irreducible way, Summers of Love, allegiance with sunshine is a quiet stand against oppression and aggressive behavior. Since curators expect that people are going to be upset about the state of the nation, many galleries have been engaging in acts of anticipatory consolation. Their aim is to locate what Jonathan Richman once called “that summer feeling,” and amplify it.
And since that summer feeling is a lazy feeling, one full of downshifts and deceleration and long, slow-moving, lemonade-flavored days on the front stoop, New Jersey art spaces have eased off their wintertime intensity. Novado Gallery (110 Morgan) began the year with a blistering, politically forthright group show curated by Jerome China, and followed that up with an exhibition of Lori Perbeck’s surprisingly dramatic still life photographs. “Summer Mosaic,” by contrast, is an amble around a familiar neighborhood, genial, welcoming, as pretty as it needs to be, full of crosscurrents that wash over your feet in gentle waves.
Several favorites who’ve lit up this pretty room before are back for a return visit. These include the experimental photographer Susan MacDonald, a slow exposure lens-mover who transforms the Scottish hill country into grand, gauzy images in football-fan flat-panel TV-sized frames and Robert Glisson, an oil painter whose heaps of pastel-colored shapes cohere into heat-haze hallucinations of forests and rivers. Sculptor Michael Alfano, decorator of the waterfront with slivered images of human faces, populates the “Mosaic” with a few more of his crescent-shaped characters.
The delicate radiance of Robert Glisson.
There’s a common lilt to all of these creative voices. Their pieces ruffle your hair like a river breeze. Gallerist Anne Novado summons up a proper swirl of summer energy on “At the Beach,” a monumental (but oddly gentle) abstract oil painting that uses texture and implied motion to generate a sense of place. Ridges and layers of yellow and russet paint fill the frame from corner to corner, and silver speckles embedded in the paint mimic the flash of sunlight on wave-touched sand. Toward the bottom of the piece, hardly noticeable on first inspection, Novado has affixed a seashell. The great arc of paint-strokes that gives “At the Beach” its tidal pull mimic the shell’s curves. It’s as if the single mollusk who once lived under that chitinous cap contains in microcosm the entire force of the ocean.
The wondrous weirdness of water returns in “Basin,” an oil painting on linen by the Dutch artist Lex Heilijgers. Two gender-indeterminate figures sit face to face, half submerged and half dry, under the sun. They’re touching; in fact, they might be joined at the heels. Their postures are playful, a little flirty, open, loosened up by the heat. Heilijgers has run a diagonal line — the water line — through the bodies of his figures and nudged their lower halves slightly out of sync with their upper bodies. This mimics the optical distortion caused by liquid. But it’s also a hint that there’s something going on beneath the surface that the two figures might not be completely aware of. These characters’ lower regions are getting signals that haven’t yet made it to their brains. As every hormonal teenager knows, in summer, the body often knows more than the mind.
Good as gold: Heidi Curko's gilded script.
In the oil painting “Eruption of Spring,” the top pops off of the jack-in-the-box. Heilijgers sets thick, angled lines of primary colors dancing, twisting, and tangling, against a butterscotch background. Some end in trumpet-like bells. Others are squared off like hammer heads. Flower-like objects sprout from a few. Every sprout behaves differently according to its color (the red branch runs in right angles, the orange ones are sinuous, the greens zigzag like pipes jerry-rigged by a plumber), but they all carry the productive chaos of fecundity.
A similar dynamic is at work in “Asphaltum and Gold” — but if Heilijgers’s painting is overgrown, sunny June, Heidi Curko’s answer is steaming July. Her panel features electric squiggles of metallic paint against a smeared field of pink and black. From a distance, Curko’s marks look like written script, but upon closer inspection, it’s more like a transcription of the flight of an insect, traced through its buzzing ascent, midair reversals, and sudden dives to avoid a swat.
Mysterious alphabets pop up elsewhere in “Summer Mosaic.” Tantalizing illegibility one of the common traits of summer art shows: it’s too hot out for strokes to coalesce into letters, or for letters to coalesce into language. Thus, we get words that don’t add up to phrases, symbols without referent, characters without a plot. Novado’s partner and accomplice Eleazar Sanchez contributes an augmented photograph of a graffiti-tagged wall with white scrawl on black metal in an energetic but overheated script. “Dare 2” speaks of long summer nights, the suffocating anonymity of city darkness, the need to make a communicative mark on the surface of the city, and the ultimate futility of that effort. We don’t understand what the tagger means, and we suspect the tagger might not know, either. Cleverly, the artist has extended the graffiti beyond the frame, adding loops, curlicues, and line extensions in paint past the edges of the photograph. It’s an act of radical understanding. Sanchez has become the vandal’s collaborator, entering into a dialogue with the unknown tagger without exchanging a word.
The words of the prophets: Eleazar Sanchez's enhanced street photograph.
That same looseness of line and malleability of space extends to depictions of the material world. Under the influence of summer, the boundaries between objects seem to fray in the heat, and tightly-sewn lines become unstitched. Nathalie Kalbach’s city is a breathing thing: it’s malleable, permeable, and constantly subject to revision. Her streetscapes in acrylic and marker are characterized by bold fields of color and thin lines that look like they were committed to canvas with the quick flick of a wrist. Out of these dashes and arcs, she manages to conjure something as sturdy as architecture. “Be Bright,” an image of the sort of three story bay-windowed building typical of the western stretches of Duncan Avenue, feels like it was jotted in a hurry as Kalbach was bicycling by. This is, of course, an illusion. The briskness of her paintings gives a journalistic feel to her work. Here is summer in the city as it’s experienced by many: something fleeting, shimmering, mirage-like, but indelible in its specifics.
Set adrift on memory bliss: Kalbach's wondrous city.
Those shaky, snaky, curved lines extend to the three-dimensional works in “Summer Mosaic,” including a wall-hung sculpture by Novado that resembles a huge block of ramen dipped in Fruity Pebbles-stained milk. Less edible is Steve Datz’s “Fishing for Pollock,” a snare made from a torn-out section of chain link fence, flotation devices, netting, and tarry-black sailor’s rope. It doesn’t smell like a jetty in a Shore town, but everything else about it is redolent of the ocean. That this is an artwork that could probably catch an actual fish if it was dipped into the Atlantic at the proper angle amplifies its nautical mystique.
Across the room, an untitled sculpture matches Datz’s toughness with pure softness. On a pole, a translucent white cushions slowly inflate and deflate, and rise and fall as they do. At its most erect, the statue is a great shish kebab of pillows; at its least tumescent, it’s a bundle of pancakes and potential energy. And so it gets up and gets down, in no hurry and going nowhere in particular, sighing its way into the summer, a season as elemental as breath. The living is easy, we were once told. And when times are tough, ease is an act of resistance.
(Novado Gallery is open Tuesday through Thursday from 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. and Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. Sometimes you can catch Anne and Eleazar on Sundays and Mondays, too.)
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.
Eye Level is made possible by an Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant.
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