Every rose has its thorn: Steve Datz's "In the Pink"
Steve Datz will put you in mind of Jackson Pollock. Maybe he hates that comparison, and maybe he’s happy to own the influence; either way, it’s tough to ignore. Many of his paintings feature multicolored drip-squiggles on long, horizontal canvases. If they never quite achieve the intensity of Pollock’s plasma storms, they feel similarly kinetic, and similarly electrified. Pollock’s paintings are often suggestive of the firing neural network of a deep thinker. Datz’s synapses in paint are not quite as dense, and not quite as tormented.
They’re also not all there is to Datz’s work. The Skaneateles, New York painter and sculptor is a restless explorer, playing around with the dimensions of his frames, tucking letters and numbers into his pieces, and banging old bits of metal and industrial scrap into clever new forms that wink at us and hint at untold functions. Are they switches, or buttons, or thermostats? Datz isn’t telling. He also loves circles and squares, which he confetti-drops in bunches, and he revels in the angles made by the long sticklike shapes scattered across his canvases. “The Consistency of Inconsistency,” a solo show at Novado Gallery (110 Morgan St.), gives us a great swirl and tangle of Datz's ideas, exposes his dimensions and his good humor, and reveals him to be less of a latter-day abstract expressionist than a graceful, old-fashioned postmodernist.
And just like an old-fashioned postmodernist, he believes that if a thing is worth showing, it’s worth messing with. That includes the drip-and-splatter genre, a style that appeals to Datz for its utility and energy rather than its relationship to art history. In “Consistency of Inconsistency,” the live-wire squiggles are often the backdrop for the stuff he really wants to show us. In “Portrait of a Chair,” the shape of a high-backed and double-slatted number is knocked out of a thatch of black drippings. Then, right next to the canvas, he’s placed the chair, busy and blasted with acrylic paint curlicues. It’s part joke, part optical trick, and part winking apology for sticking us with negative space. Shadows do not support our weight. Datz isn’t satisfied with the merely theoretical: he wants to give us something to sit on.
Coins and crosses: "Pick Up Sticks"
He’s playing with our expectations, too. Datz’s chair was not pulled, in a reverse-Narnian act, out of the netherworld of his canvas. For a moment, though, he makes us believe it was. We leap to conclusions and fill in blanks, and he’s there to poke fun at our pattern-making impulses with the pointy end of his paintbrush. In the cheekily called “Square Dance,” he sets black and white quadrilaterals adrift in a grey-green background marked by black splatters. Because his technique gives the canvas depth, it seems like the squares are flying toward us from the middle of the maelstrom — a math-class Big Bang that teases a solution but provides neither formula nor guide. A similar and equally successful painting casts circles quartered into black and white wedges on a field of dusty rose. He calls this one “In the Pink,” inviting us to stay cheerful even as chaos swirls around us.
Then there are the Steven Datz abstractions that are simply content to be beautiful. In “Journey n.3,” the artist applies layers of yellow, grey, and pink acrylic to a window screen affixed atop a panel. There are drips, squiggles, and creases, but mostly, he revels in the rough texture and mottled appearance of the paint that undergirds the splatter. This “Journey” feels as old as the stones, and it hints, simultaneously at the primordial and the maritime. It has some of the heft and dignity of Brooke Lanier’s close-up images of the weathered and wave-beaten hulls of boats.
Break those chains that bind you: "Journey n.3"
But mostly Datz is led by his impulse to entertain his audience and himself. In many of his pieces, he thumbs his nose at the rectangle, augmenting his frame with strips and curves and splattering and dripping paint over whimsical contours of his own invention. Many of his pieces end up in improvised frames, too, like the post-industrial “Past Sun,” a play on the bent and time-battered panels that slip over fuse boxes. Datz’s “Sun” looks a little like an object of veneration unearthed from a dig, and a little like a robot’s iPhone case.
The sculptural works in “The Consistency of Inconsistency” speak of the factory and the junkyard, but also the carnival, too: “NEV,” a multimedia riddle in a square frame, encases the lower part of a painted circle behind chicken wire. It looks like a retired Wheel of Fortune, now inaccessible and illegible, mysterious as an artifact unearthed from the back of a barn. “Joined,” a well-turned gag in bronze, dramatizes the meeting — and fusion — of two arc-shaped bedframes. The couple, it’s implied, who rest here aren’t completely separate, but they aren’t totally together, either.
Grate expectations: "Nev"
Like most of “The Consistency of Inconsistency,” “Joined” doesn’t feel labored-over, even though it may have been. It’s a streamlined articulation of a single vision, with extraneous ideas pared away: a short story with a twist. Your body may not fit on the strange bed. Nevertheless, Datz is wagering that the intrigue he generates will be enough to make the viewer want to get snug. He’s always there to pull out a chair for you, even it’s yanked from a parallel dimension and slathered with acrylic. Those gestures of good will pervade the exhibition, and help explain how such a provocative show, full of splatter and drips, visual jokes, pointed asides, and acts of art made in defiance of the rules of the coloring book, can feel so darn comfortable.
(Novado Gallery is open on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Saturday from 11 a.m. until 6 p.m.)
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.
