Moving studies of fragility
Sculpture is the most tangible of the visual arts, but Steve
In these latest works, Hollinger makes great use of the figure -- usually a man, depicted in a silhouette of light. ''Man With Flowers" takes off from 19th-century photographer Edweard Muybridge's studies of motion. A wheel turns within a black box mounted on the wall; Hollinger has stamped little figures out of the copper rim of the wheel. As the rim passes before an eye-level screen set before a hole opening to the sun, we see the figure projected on the screen. He kneels, then holds up a bouquet of flowers. It's an image of sweetness coming from an elegant contraption that is in some ways a throwback to early-20th-century moving pictures, except that it is solar powered, heralding the future.
''Cenotaph" operates like an illuminated flipbook. The viewer steps on a pedal to turn the light on and activate the sculpture, then looks through a clear prism to see the rush of images: a spear carrier practicing his moves against a changing background that includes landscapes, a crowded street, and an exploding mushroom cloud. The figure evokes a soldier throughout history; he might be the undercurrent of war that runs through our psyches even in the most placid times.
Hollinger's concern with fragility comes through most in two sculptures he made largely out of lotus leaves. He fashioned cubes from the leaves and positioned them on brass axles. Walk past, and the air current of your motion wafts over the grid of leaf cubes, setting them in gentle and unpredictable rotation. They speak to the obsessive care and detail that this artist puts into his art, occasionally operating on a minute scale, or working with material so delicate it's hard to imagine how it has survived. He encases many of his pieces in wood boxes, and they are quite sturdy, but that doesn't interfere with Hollinger's take-home message: Honor what is precious and fleeting. It may only show up in a shaft of sunlight and disappear, but that makes it all the more rare and wonderful.
An eyeful of color
Joanne Mattera wrote the book on encaustic, that method of painting with translucent layers of wax. It's called ''The Art of Encaustic Painting." Mattera, who has a show up at Arden Gallery, revels in the medium's stained-glass-like luminosity. She's a colorist whose principle concern is how tones interact and play off one another, the vibrations they create, and the retinal zing they set off.
The risk with work so visually jazzy is that it's all eye candy and no substance. Mattera overcomes this possibility by setting her wild colors in simple, Modernist formations: grids made up of blocks or series of stacked bands. The artist takes her palette from the paintings of Mughal India and Renaissance Siena. ''Cielo (Uttar 268)" is a 4-by-4-foot piece featuring three columns of horizontal bands, all against a lush, foggy-blue ground. Most of the bands are blue as well, but through that deep tone buzz more surface colors: pink, red, lime green.
The structure of these works is simple, but by no means minimalist. The encaustic seeps and drips, the tones pulse, the many layers wink out at you then dissolve. ''Uttar 133" sets a series of red and gold blocks in a grid against a buttery yellow ground, and here Mattera demonstrates the possibilities of encaustic and the different veils and surfaces it can create: dappled orange beneath a sheet of white, then dotted with orange on top, very waxy; or rough and scored, like a rock; or nearly liquid, smearing like red wine.
Throughout, there's a sense -- as with Hollinger's sculptures -- that light is powering these works, shining through them. In the darkest days of the year, it's the perfect exhibition to warm up to -- like spending an afternoon at the beach in July, only you don't have to wear sunscreen.
Chaotic precision
Matthew Ritchie is one of the more complicated and provocative painters working today. Mario Diacono at Ars Libri has a small morsel of his work up. Last year, Ritchie created an installation at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York; critics said it was like stepping inside a painting. Diacono doesn't have the space for such audacity, so we must settle for ''Two-Way Shot," a wild and comical painting that floods off the canvas and onto the wall.
Ritchie works within a symbolic system that, while precise, allows for a lot of chaos. Indeed, the painting seems set on depicting chaos; it's part of Ritchie's grand mythology, which encompasses the beginning and end of creation. Different gestures tangle with one another and create the impressions of depth and flatness: cords of violet and brown, snarled up in foliage; roughly painted bull's-eyes popping off black lines that radiate from circles all over the surface. Beneath it all the canvas is flat, with gray patterns peeking out from the havoc. The whole of it is both fecund and threatening, joyous and consuming.
Bold, black gestures dance over the wall from the edges of the canvas, bringing us down a peg from the illusion of three-dimensionality in the painting to the black-and-white flatness of the wall drawing. Yet it snakes and swerves with ardor, creating what might be a landscape or something far more unpredictable. It's a voracious, unrelenting painting. If only there were more of it.
