An idyll in acrylic and tassels: Frank Hanavan's "Mumblypeg"
Frank Hanavan’s Hoboken is wet. In his streetscapes, surfaces glisten. The sky is rarely glowering, but it does seem full; ready to have something to say, or wrapping up something that it is busy saying. The canopy of foliage that hangs over the streetcorners feels saturated with moisture. Even the shadows on the sidewalk are puddle blue. Businesses have their umbrellas open. A few people do, too.
Yet there is no feeling of threat in “Natural & Plus,” a cheerful, welcoming twenty-piece show of Hanavan’s acrylic paintings that will hang in the Hoboken Historical Museum (1301 Hudson St.) until the beginning of August. If it must rain, it’s going to be a refreshing storm, one quick, dousing, and decisive, and likely to be punctuated with a rainbow, or, at the very least, a smear of vibrant color on a surface of concrete. It is probably warm outside. It is almost certainly June.
Water, Hanavan knows, is a precondition of life, and Hoboken, in Hanavan’s view, is a place that is hungry to live. So he adorns his images of the Mile Square with brushstrokes that feel like little pools. They have dimension and depth, and they invite the viewer to jump in and splash around. It is a testament to the fluidity of Hanavan’s painting — and his good humor, too — that his representations of solid ground and solid structures feel nearly as liquid as his images of ponds and rivers. Everything from brick to bark takes on the character of a droplet. Parks are verdant and sea-green, and the cafés and restaurants await their customers. The whole town, it seems, is waiting to be lapped up, and ready to provide nourishment.
Slipping (into something): a very Hoboken-ish image.
The sumptuousness of this vision might come as a surprise to some gallerygoers who’ve followed Frank Hanavan’s recent work. The Jersey City resident is a photographer as well as a painter, and his gorgeous shots of India Square carry with them a feeling of underlying disquiet that does not appear on these canvases. Hanavan’s Jersey City is just as radiant as his Hoboken is, but it appears to be under a darker enchantment. A visitor to “Natural & Plus” may well wonder if Hanavan simply likes Hoboken more than he likes his hometown.
I doubt that’s so. It is, I reckon, just residue of the media he uses. Photographic prints, even when they’re emotional, tend to have a hard and stark core to them; acrylic is bright, lush, and sumptuous, even when the painter doesn’t mean to be terribly positive. Hanavan plainly finds the city street a fascinating place, and although he’s interested in habitability (and his Hoboken is, above all things, a well-appointed terrarium for species of all sorts), he’s not quite as intrigued by individual people as he is in the ways in which their bodies interact with the built environment. There are almost no faces in “Natural & Plus;” instead, the figures who populate idyllic sidewalk scenes like “Hoboken Handshake” appear to be becoming one with the daylight, melting into the brownstones and the blasts of sunlight. They’re noontime shadows. There’s a feeling of transience about them, but somehow, they aren’t haunted.
That sense of pleasant impermanence is present in “Pier A Park,” a painting of five human figures on a bench before the greensward that fronts the Lackawanna Terminal. One appears to be addressing another; a woman on the far end hugs her knee and stares downward; two others on the far side sit with their backs turned to us. Circumstances have brought them together on a sunny afternoon, but they aren’t really interacting. Soon, they’ll all get up and walk away, but the landscape will still be beautiful. Their presence enhances it, but it isn’t strictly necessary: the trees, the buildings, and the old factories are charismatic enough to render us supporting actors. Hoboken needs us, a little, anyway. We might be an ancillary decoration, but we do add our bit.
Slap me like a wave: Hanavan's "Pier A Park"
We see the same dynamic in “Hoboken Chicken Emergency” (Hanavan’s titles add a dimension of impish humor to a show that’s already a lot of fun), a painting of an outdoor eating area. Just about every seat under the umbrellas is taken by sun-bronzed human being. But it’s the boughs of the trees that are really laying claim to the restaurant, climbing over the sidewalk and over the heads of the customers to tickle the plate glass. These silhouetted humans will get their lunch and walk away. The vegetation will keep hanging out, and keep knocking. In “Nonplussed,” a lovely portrait of the Washington Street grocery that lends its name to this exhibition, it’s the enveloping darkness of the city at night that dominates the image, closing in on the hot light of the store and its merchandise, framing the tulips and oranges and the shadowy customers in velvet.
In the wee small hours: Hanavan's "Nonplussed"
Paintings like that one take liberties with realism. Others transgress expectations completely. Some of Hanavan’s paintings tip straight into fantasy, or at least offer a colorful enhancement of the quotidian. In “Hetty Green,” an image of spring in overdrive, brushstrokes bunch up and pop out of the canvas, and coalesce into dolphin statues in a city pool. “Six Seven,” a small painting in an ornate frame, is festooned with tiny cloth balls that pop out of the corners of the park scene and hover over sitters on benches and bicycles parked beneath the trees. These feel like a pure expression of exuberance, with optical effects and sparkles of daylight given a physical form. It’s a wild efflorescence — a sunny afternoon as a plush prism.
Hoboken, as we all know, has an unfortunate tendency to flood. Much of it is right at the level of the river. Every raindrop feels like a tap on the shoulder and a reminder that the water table is rising. “Natural & Plus” doesn’t deny any of that. But Hanavan’s acrylics remind us that this place on earth is a natural collaboration between stone, sea, and sky. It’s a fertile world he’s showing us, one where the air itself is in bloom. Its beauty, he slyly suggests, is not contingent on our appreciation of its details. It’ll take us in like family does. We can cast our shadows on its streets if we’d like. But when we move on, it’ll keep right on shining.
(This review also ran in the June and July issue of the Hudson Scholar. It's always a great pleasure to write for the Scholar. “Natural & Plus” is on view during the Historical Museum's normal hours: 2 p.m. until 7 p.m. from Tuesdays through Thursdays, 1 p.m until 5 p.m. on Fridays, noon until 5 p.m. on weekends. Drop in, learn something about Frank Sinatra.)
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.
