Felix Gonzalez-Torres's "Untitled (Placebo - Landscape - for Roni)"
galleries
Felix Gonzalez-Torres died in 1996, but 2007 has been a stellar year for him. He was tapped to represent the United States in the 2007 Venice Biennale. He's only the second artist to be so honored posthumously; Robert Smithson got the nod in 1982, nine years after he died.
For Gonzalez-Torres, whose work is largely installation-based and often ephemeral - thus not a hot commodity at auction houses like that of other artists who burned bright and died young, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat - the surge in attention is not market-driven. It has more to do with his themes of mortality, anti-elitism, and economics, which hit as close to home as they ever have.
The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts has mounted one of Gonzalez-Torres's signature works. "Untitled (Placebo - Landscape - for Roni)" (1993) is a sumptuous carpet of hard candy spilling over the concrete floor, warming the modernist chill of the Le Corbusier building. Each candy is wrapped in gold cellophane, and visitors are invited to take a piece to eat. (Another version of "Untitled (Placebo)" opened this month at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown.)
I'm reminded of the line from the Eucharist: "Take this, all of you, and eat it. This is my body." The Cuban-born artist was not making any messianic claims, but his sharing gesture is full of tenderness; it's literally sweet, and the dwindling candy references his own body and how fleeting life is. As the candies are eaten, the candy spill diminishes; nothing lasts. He died at 38 of AIDS.
Gonzalez-Torres upended the "don't touch" rules of art exhibitions, and indeed the profit-driven rules of the art market and capitalism, because he gave much of his work away. In interviews and in his own writing, he criticized the economic strategies of Ronald Reagan; he was no fan of trickle-down economics. His solution, at least on this small scale, was a gift economy. His strategy seems to have been to disarm power structures, such as museums, with kindness. It was brilliant. Naturally, the art world's institutions - and their visitors - ate it up.
Finishing touches
Art dealer Mario Diacono, a genial and bright light on Boston's gallery scene since 1985, closes up shop with his final show of works by Luisa Rabbia and Laura Harrison. Diacono will manage the collection of the Maramotti family, which runs the Max Mara fashion house in Italy. The Maramottis' private museum, Collezione Maramotti, opened in September in Bologna. Diacono will travel there several times a year to oversee temporary exhibitions.
Diacono, who ran a gallery in Italy before moving to the United States, has worked with the Maramottis for 30 years. "I opened the gallery with the support of this collector, with the aim that we could put together a coherent collection," he says. "Many of the works I've exhibited . . . are already on permanent view there."
His last show is another example of Diacono's rigorous aesthetic and his passion for contemporary painting. Luisa Rabbia's captivating "Yesterdaytodaytomorrow" pushes at definitions of landscape. A blue horizon crosses three sheets of paper under a white sky, then drops off like a cliff's edge. In the center, a blue house rises askew from the blue, with a tree emerging monstrously from windows and roof. Roots crossed with white lines snake and squirm across the field of blue like arteries in a body.
Laura Harrison painted "Death Rides a Horse, Surrendered City" on canvas mounted on cardboard, giving the work a rough, handmade quality. She's made a pattern of forms across the three panels that give it the look of a circuit board, then added color to certain forms and filled in other areas with black. Step away, and the black areas blur into the silhouette of a horse and rider, with the suggestion of a horizon line. It's a figure-ground conundrum: Is the black backing to the pattern the ground, even though it describes a figure?
Most Diacono shows confront the viewer with such riddles, addressed in smart, savvy, and often daunting ways. This dealer has never offered easy answers, but he has served up a generation of provocative exhibitions. He's not about to stop. "I will not be a dealer," he says, "but I will do the same thing I've done."
Lost in the paint
Laura S. Johnson's show at MPG Contemporary does not rise to Diacono's level. Johnson, a painter entranced with pattern and deft with collage, has interesting ideas that could be executed with more finesse. Her painting hand seems stiff, her paint too thick. "Juggling Act" shows a woman in a ballooning green polka-dot skirt juggling tennis balls. Patterns are everywhere, painted or collaged on, activating the canvas: the carpet, the wall, the grass outside, the paper dolls on the floor. But the woman herself fades to beige among all these pulsing patterns; she needs to hold her own.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
