Jess is an artist that goes (falls?) down a lot of rabbit holes: obsessive layering of multiple picture puzzles, intricate paintings of obscure prints and photographs, deep dives into the occult; he is impossible to fully describe.
The revelation in this show for me are the early paintings. Don Quixote and Sanchez come over the hill in an infinitely lonely space toward the slowly appearing Dulcinea and the even slower unicorn. Yes that is a unicorn nuzzling Dulcines’s arm with a horn extending into the ruins of the castle. Idly I wonder if the difference between illustration and painting is Time, the time that the viewer takes to comprehend the image.
The ultramarine color of Don Quixote et. al. continues down to make Dulcinea’s hair, travels right to make the castle and trees and trickles down to describe the unicorn’s mane. The trees and bushes climb up the left-hand side forming a cliff. It all seems so easy.
The collages are fascinating too but it did make me wonder why— when his paintings are so sensual and fluid— did he pick up the Exacto knife?
Jess was a collector of images when it was both easier and harder to find them, in other words—pre-internet. The exquisite craftsmanship, composition and dimensional space in the collages he created is astonishing—pre-Photoshop. I’m fascinated by the way that advancements in technology also involve loss. Maybe particularly in art where the ability to create images more quickly is not a positive thing. Jess spent countless hours finding the printed images he used for Narkissos, thinking about the relative sizes of his images, how they might work together and then cutting and assembling them.
Iliatova’s paintings puzzle me.
“Wonderful paint handling” as a friend of mine remarked and I do agree: there are extremely subtle calibrations of hues and tones. There is a lovely sense of space shaped by the reflective floors and cunningly painted and placed trompe l’oeil objects.
The subject seems at first to be an art studio or class populated by women or more appropriately described “young ladies” primly dressed in lab coats who pose or draw. On further inspection, though, they just appear to be engaging in these activities—they are all posing, as if for a fashion shoot.
The woman on the right, a stylist or hairdresser from the way she is dressed, seems to have been holding up that cloth for some time. Looking around the gallery, I wondered for a moment if the models were all the same woman: the faces with their somewhat bored expressions are so similar—a time lapse maybe of a single woman’s life, but that doesn’t seem quite right.
Vera Iliatova “A Trance, Reversal” (2024)
One exception is the seated girl in A Trance… on the left reading in the sunlight—she stood out in the gallery (as not posing—being engaged in what she is doing). And another is this more contemporary looking painter in the back corner of Rehearsal…
From the exhibition notes :
“As she moves through memory and time, Iliatova’s self-portraiture method anchors her dreamlike imagery. She describes the vicissitudes of her younger self as “ciphers, stand-ins, imposters, and actresses” representing the struggles of adolescence and early adulthood.”
So my impressions are not so far off; they are intended by the artist, and yet it’s disturbing and sad to see these paintings that portray both the artist and other people so superficially.
Rodney Dickson pours a lot of energy and a lot of paint into his pictures. Well, he doesn’t actually pour the paint, he trowels it on or spirals it directly from the tube. The smaller works at two feet square defy gravity and are very pleasurable to look at. I’d like to eat Red and White 2—raspberries and butter cream frosting.
The larger paintings don’t work as well—they have suggestions of spatial structure, grids and directional lines, but they are flattened out by their placement in the center of the support surrounded by white edges.
And in the basement, a line-up of women in masks and burkas painted on strips of sheeting. I don’t get it.
But in a catalogue available at the gallery, I noticed some amazing drawings made at Rockaway Beach that make me interested in this artist.
Almost as prodigal with the paint as Dickson, but completely different, another side of Jess: the sculpted flowers travel across the canvas hypnotically.
—CNQ