Terry Rowlett: "Angels, Devils and Mortals"

Open Gallery: Works on Paper

Through July 16 at Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist's current show presents the work of Terry Rowlett, a recent and very strong addition to the gallery's roster and to Nashville's art community. His striking representational paintings combine fluent references to painting from the Renaissance and other eras with the echoes of an intense contemporary religious upbringing.

"End of Summer" shows a couple sitting on a Triumph motorcycle parked in the woods overlooking a lake. The man wears a vest, jeans and boots—a total Southern biker look—and he leans back on the bike with his eyes closed and a smile on his face. A longhaired woman wearing a halter top and cutoffs straddles him and looks out at the viewer. On the ground in front of them are a red and white plastic cooler and a couple of apple cores. At first glance, it's just a picture of an attractive good ol' boy and gal having a party in the woods, but the background is a luminous vista of bluffs over the lake and the skies above them, stylistically reminiscent of Hudson River School painters. The plants in the foreground are delineated so that they stand out as discrete entities, like a high Renaissance painting (for example, the Piero di Cosima work in the Wadsworth Atheneum show currently at the Frist). The canvas itself has a curved top, the shape suggesting a panel from an altarpiece.

The other pieces in the show are similar turns on contemporary characters in settings suited for classical portraits of saints, heroes and poets. "Man With an Axe" portrays a scarlet-clad figure standing in the woods with one hand tucked in his shirt like Napoleon, leaning on his axe as if it were a saint's attribute. The forest setting contains biological details like a lizard and a woodchuck (maybe a beaver) that recall the ways in which Renaissance painters introduced bits of scientific description into historical or religious paintings. The subject of "A Man" is identified as a modern figure by his clothes, but he holds a walking stick and stands on a mountain path that could be the setting for a Romantic era scene of a young man experiencing nature.

To some extent, these are humorous paintings, giving familiar present-day people the full Old Masters treatment. All the visual facility might be seen as a one-line joke, the anachronistic combination of subject matter and style. But Rowlett pursues more complex observations and shows more far-reaching interest in his sources and subjects.

Rowlett grew up in a very religious household and held conservative Christian beliefs through graduate school. Soon after, while studying the Bible in Israel, he had a kind of reverse conversion experience and left fundamentalism behind. Still, those years of belief and study predictably left a mark, and his instinct for religious iconography is evident. Motorcycles feature in many of his works, and he plays on their status as objects of veneration. More importantly, the characters in all of his paintings are singular, intense personalities, such as the women staring each other down in "The Return of Diana" or the glaring subject of "American Cheerleader." In life, saints would be the people who have a powerful effect on those they encounter. Rowlett treats his figures as religious characters in this way, recognizing that their uniqueness gives them an everyday spiritual power. He paints the people who seem just a little bit more alive than everyone around them.

The use of Christian iconography is more explicit in "Who Would Jesus Bomb," in which Christ, replete with white and purple robes, shepherd's staff and halo, knocks at the side of an armored vehicle in a Middle Eastern war zone. An occupant of the car is either opening up the hatch or closing it in response to the knock. This joins a body of antiwar art that has been circulating the past few years, but it is better done than most, perhaps because it is more open-ended. Christ seems saddened by the setting, but it is not clear whether the soldier rejects or answers his knock. Harper's Magazine is publishing this work, along with two more of Rowlett's paintings, in its August issue to accompany an article on Christianity and the war in Iraq.

The open gallery portion of the show features two artists who've been in Nashville for a while now, Dan Brawner and Sara La, along with Kelly Popoff from Columbus, Ohio. Brawner, a faculty member in the graphics program at Watkins College of Art & Design, has done a series of charcoal drawings based on an immediately recognizable aspect of the local landscape—the sheared-off branches left by Nashville Electric Service's blitz of tree trimming. He focuses and expands on the basic shapes left behind by the NES crews, bulbous and conical forms that end in a disc. These drawings work as abstractions but have an unusually well-defined specificity to Nashville.

The concreteness of Brawner's drawings also comes out in his modeling techniques, which have an architectonic quality that lays bare the fundamental dynamics of the shapes. He builds the forms from sequences of circular patterns crossed by groups of straight lines, representing the combination of linearity and roundness that makes up a tree visually. Though a tree doesn't look like the combination of patterns Brawner uses, he makes an accurate observation about natural form on another level.

Sara La frequently portrays Chinese women in work that explores women's bodies and their presentation to others. Her contribution to this show consists of a set of five drawings that revolve around the theme of foot-binding. In traditional Chinese culture, small feet with a certain shape were prized as an indication of grace and duty. From an early age, a girl's feet were bound to achieve the ideal size and shape, but this torturous rite of passage was also an occasion for beauty, as the woman would wear elaborately decorated "lotus shoes." The drawings show a woman embroidering the shoes, a foot (presumably sore) soaking in water, and one of the shoes in a still life with fruit. The most striking image shows an old woman, naked except for the embroidered shoes on her tiny feet. Her breasts hang down, her pubic hair has grayed, and she supports herself on a cane, but she squints and has a hint of a grin on her face, as if she knows something the viewer does not. She is the image of the crone, the final stage of a woman's life where power and knowledge emerge from having survived and passed through so much experience. The woman in La's drawing seems aware that she is still standing after everything that she may have been subject to, including the beautiful torture of bound feet.

Kelly Popoff's ink and watercolor drawings were inspired by her recent pregnancy and a Funkadelic song that gave her the series' title, "Biological Speculation." Many of the pieces have pleasurable, dark colors like the stains from tea or juice, and she combines clearly rendered lines with splotches where the ink crawls out into the paper.

This is a strong show all around, with each of the artists making well-chosen statements. Rowlett is particularly impressive, with a bravura visual imagination that goes beyond its own facility to achieve observational power.