Medium Well
In the first of a series of shows exploring different art media, Zeitgeist tackles painting
by David Maddox
Zeitgeist has the ambition of a museum lurking inside a commercial gallery, as will be evident for the next several months. The gallery is assembling a series of group shows surveying work in different media, laying claim to a curatorial voice that weighs in on what each medium is and means. First up: painting, the heart of Western art, apparently not relegated to history’s dustbin.Zeitgeist built this show from the work of 15 artists, predominantly gallery regulars and others with Tennessee ties. With a handful of pieces, the show finds the boundaries between painting and other media. The approach self-consciously questions its own organizing principle—sure, this show is about painting, but who knows what that is? But in the end, Zeitgeist finds plenty of vitality within painting’s traditional confines.
Kelly Popoff-Punches takes the first step away from painting by layering the paint into a thick, cakey surface with a grainy, mineral texture. She goes further and paints with actual dirt, applied in patches big enough to look like a bit of exposed earth. This “painting” is really a mixed-media work, with other collage elements that add lots of textural variety, slick as well as grainy, thin and thick in spots.
Several works veer toward sculpture. Gallery director Lain York has for years painted on wooden boxes that protrude a little from the wall. He scored and gouged those surfaces in ways that were more carving than painting. More recently he has taken his paintings off the wall, working with smaller wooden boxes that he lines up and stacks on the ground. In this show, he has a three-part work, each piece about the size and shape of a tombstone, bathed in soothing tones of creamy greens and marked with wispy drawings and furtive marks of faces.
John Tallman slathers wooden shapes with thick layers of acrylic and arrays them on the wall and on the floor. Tallman’s creation is the array of these objects within three-dimensional space, another clear nod to sculpture.
The show also explores the painting’s intersection with photography. Rocky Horton paints with photo chemicals on photo paper, creating abstractions that could be ink drawings but make new use of photography’s chemical processes. Gene Wilken’s contribution, “Homage to Jean-Baptiste Corot After Gerhard Richter,” is a photograph of a surreally green country lane with the center of the image blurred. The bucolic landscape seems worthy of a 19th century painter like Corot, and the blurriness mimics contemporary artist Richter’s paintings of photographs. Wilken has done a photograph imitating a painter imitating photographs.
In the end, much of the work that stands out in this show reinforces what painting has always done—provide pleasure from form and colors. Lars Strandh’s abstract paintings each present a single rectangle of color framed by a white background. The predominant colors are distinct—gray, black, red—but narrow horizontal lines of color are overlaid on the basic color ground. While the rectangles are clean and precise, the lines within the rectangles are more loosely painted, with rich colors that make these abstract forms more sensuous than austere.
A survey of painting would be incomplete without the human figure, and it’s represented here in Terry Rowlett’s new Old Master portraits and Farrar Hood’s sleeping woman surrounded by the patterns of interior design. Beyond the figure, Western art has the nude body at its core—a subject that Sara La explores, if unconventionally. Her “Bird of Paradise 1” shows a man, nude except for a harlequin hat, hanging upside-down. One leg is crooked backward, and he holds that ankle with one hand. His other hand holds his penis in such a way as to divide a copious stream of pee into two streams that arc out in opposite directions. (The painting has earned the nickname “The Golden Arches.”) It’s a funny image. First of all, it’s like a little boy playing. The figure can also be seen as dancing or making an acrobatic move, in keeping with a jester, but the figure also could be suffering torture—the foot and ankle of one leg are not visible, and for all we know they are locked in irons.
The pose also resembles the crucified figure in the Hanged Man card from the Rider-Waite tarot deck. The meanings assigned to the Hanged Man include treachery or sacrifice, along with more tangential qualities like wisdom and discernment. Tarot cards represent archetypes, vivid images that are open to many interpretations, in much the same way that paintings have the power to create pictures that become fodder for speculation and imagination. Sara La navigates between familiar and unexpected images to introduce a new figure for imaginative use.
This show plays around the boundaries of painting, but also digs into the medium’s sweet spots—the creation of multifaceted images, the play of cultural, historical and social references, and the sensuous characteristics of paint and pigment.
At 6 p.m. on Tuesday, April 8, Zeitgeist is hosting a panel discussion about painting that will feature Rocky Horton and two painters not in the show, Terry Thacker and Kelly Williams.
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