"Hello, my name is Benedict Leca, and I am the curator of this show. Would you like me to give you a tour?" Leca visits the gallery that houses the Cincinnati Art Museum's internationally acclaimed show Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman (through January 2, 2011) two or three times a day. Several people look up, at first surprised and then with anticipation, as Leca launches into a provocative and illuminating description of the relationship between Gainsborough's bold brush strokes and the equally daring women he painted (the "demi-reps" of the day, women with "half" reputations who were derided as impure), both shockingly modern in their socially confining context.
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Todd Reynolds' oils' and watercolors' most salient contemporary features depict an America in which chronic violence is implied, hope is in abeyance. His quasi-narrative, usually large scale paintings rip the niceties and pieties off of middle class life, portraying, instead, a near-Surreal world of low-life characters, drug-induced or -inspired people in scenarios of dead-end near apocalypse. His oevre is remarkably akin to the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates: tough, nasty, gritty, non-redemptive.
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Francisco José de Goya was 53 years old, seriously deaf but acutely visual, when he published the extraordinary series of eighty images called Los Caprichos now on view at the Taft Museum of Art. Caprichos—the word means "whims" or "fancies"—in this artist's hands become the thoughtless, often cruel, frequently selfish extravagances of a society in which the verities are up for question and political and economic uncertainties spawn frivolous behavior. Where are the grownups, one wonders, as foolishness follows foolishness and witches and such like gain due respect.
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Ivan Fortushniak returns to Manifest Gallery this month with a solo exhibition of 15 modest sized works that range from the prosaic to the superb. A god in his own way, Fortushniak fashions painted worlds that resonate with ambiguity and unease. In his universe figures from the past stare obliquely into contemporary landscapes, are compelled by invisible forces skyward, and take part in tense, sometimes dangerous, interactions. Despite his professed Christian motivations, all but a few of Fortushniak's paintings come across as secular, surreal, narratives. More SyFy than TBN, the best of these works are a haunted and haunting lot.
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Who does not have a collection? From Imelda Marcos (shoes) to Wayne Gretzky (coins), the urge to amass prized objects is widespread. When we fall in love with the tactile or the purely sensory, the things or events that talk back to us of their history, their beauty, their thrill, or their odd place in the flow of human evolution, then we want more, and more, and more, and the hunt is on.
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Place is the ostensible subject of Rosson Crow's painted dreamscapes, and out of the seven canvases in her exhibition, Myth of the American Motorcycle, at the Contemporary Arts Center, only two are outdoor scenes. In all, the artist's depiction of space is loose and layered, barely hinting at architectural detail or expansive depth of sky to provide the viewer with visceral position. This obfuscation of place is a result of Crow's process.
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Diana Duncan Holmes presents a body of photo-based work in her solo exhibition Movement, Chance, Light at the Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery opening on December 17 and continuing through February 27th, 2011. Holmes' work falls squarely within the contemporary mode of art-making in which traditional media are used in innovative ways. In this case, digital photographic methods are employed to create a series of carefully formed two dimensional works which bear little resemblance to photographic pictures in which a subject is described in a specific way through the mechanical transformations inherent to the camera.
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The Greenwich House Gallery's current show, DUO, features new work by two prominent Cincinnati artists—Tom Towhey and Greg Storer.
Tom Towhey's paintings have been described as surreal fantasies—fairy tales conjuring thoughts of Alice in Wonderland. Towhey often fills his canvases edge to edge with layers of detail. It is this layering, or the creation of "subtexts" as he has said, that makes his work so interesting to look at. Some of his favorite subjects have included teapots, elves and clowns, shoes. He says that he is interested in the psychological effects of color and shapes.
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Benedict Leca: Curating to Inform and Delight
Todd Reynolds at the Weston Art Gallery
