The elements beyond our control
Eric Aho: Wilderness
At: Alpha Gallery, 38 Newbury St., through June 4. 617-536-4465, alphagallery.com
Hello My Name Is Pixnit
At: Judi Rotenberg Gallery, 130 Newbury St., through June 1. 617-437-1518, judirotenberg.com
Raul Gonzalez: Chingasos ‘El C.V. cuento historico’
At: The New England Gallery of Latin American Art, 184 Cottage St., East Boston, through June 5. 617-418-5838, neglaa.com
"Wilderness," painter Eric Aho's dark and breathtaking exhibit at Alpha Gallery, is wild in more ways than one. There's the way he slashes paint over his canvas, with bold, big, unfettered strokes. And there are the places he portrays, plunging his viewers deep into a fire-scorched wood, or bringing us to the brink of a frozen river where the ice has reared up and shattered. In his compositions, brute force comes face to face with vulnerability, and chaos collides with order. These nature paintings capture something of humanity, then, as well.
Look at "Ice Cut (1931)." Aho paints a rectangular hole cut in thick ice, made for the cold dip that accompanies a sauna. The yawning, impenetrable black of the water puts the viewer at the edge of an abyss, but because the abyss is man-made, framed in a rectangle, it could as easily be a portal. The darkness both lures and terrifies. Meanwhile, the detail and light that surround it carry similar contradictions - the small, human scale of the scuffle of brush marks on the snowy ice reassures, but the chill blue of the cut itself and its reflection in the dark water broadcast the freezing temperatures.
There's athletic fierceness to the paint application of "Blasted Tree," with broad strokes and smudges of pale blue, gray, and deep green. Then a tender, bright yellow spike of color shoots up against all the muted tones - the exposed innards of a tree, just splintered.
Some paintings focus more on domesticity. In "Long White Barn," Aho uses texture to delineate forms, rather than color. He paints the barn in long, even white strokes, a vision of horizontality, broken up by three white barn doors, where the paint is flat, the strokes invisible. The barn fits neatly in a field white-blue with snow; the horizon is blushed with shadow and stippled with pale trees, under a serene sky. In this quiet scene, the enveloping snow seems to have brought everyday life to a halt. It may be the weather, or a fire, or simply the wilderness itself, but Aho always points to the elements beyond our control - both their seductive powers and their threat.
Graffiti in context
Pixnit is an alias for an artist who works both on the street and in galleries. It's her tag as a graffiti artist, and she brings it into her commercial gallery work in an attempt to get some street grit into a rarefied art setting.
My guess, given her rarefied visual vocabulary, is that it's more shocking to see her art in public spaces. The artist, who has a masters degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University, layers her work with references to art history and the decorative arts. She has an installation up now in the DeCordova Museum's cafe.
On the street, her ornate stencils would feel smart and maverick. In the gallery, she has to bring more to play - context changes everything. She's made a clever installation at Rotenberg that nonetheless feels not fully realized.
She stenciled the gallery walls with an ornate blue wallpaper pattern, then, with spray paint, stencils, and vinyl applications, depicted a giant swinging chandelier, a lounge chair, some bird cages, and a variety of birds. She doesn't quite effectively take over the gallery space, although some elements float above the "wallpaper" and crawl onto the floor. With her accumulation of patterns, she seems to strive to capture both the fastidious containment of Victorian culture and to overwhelm with detail.
While Pixnit doesn't quite pull it off - yet more stencils would have helped, as would more engagement with the gallery's architecture - she does make a mark with this show that leaves me wanting to see what she does next.
Lush, sad characterization
Sheer accumulation powers Raul Gonzalez's installation about a mythic Mexican boxer at the New England Gallery of Latin American Art. Gonzalez has covered the gallery walls and ceiling in paintings, drawings, and sculptural doodads that map out the story of El Chango Verde (Green Monkey), a fighter on his last legs.
Gonzalez has a talent for graphic, muscular comic-book style depictions, which he peppers with metaphors, dream images, and potent tastes of Mexican culture. There's no story line here, but all the details - a mural of a cockfight, cacti painted on old washboards, a drawing of a trio of women who threaten to sap the boxer of his virility - merge into a lush, sad characterization.
El Chango Verde, also called El C.V., has no opponents in Gonzalez's portrayal of him, but different images of the boxer (in one, he has a unicorn's horn - or perhaps a swelling, the result of a punch to the skull - while in another, he's the Christ child in Mary's arms) suggest that he is, in some way, both his own champion and his own challenger.
