Miyoko Ito
Lure: Richard C. Lange, John Slavik, and Shawn Slavik
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The gentle, almost pastel colors in this show undermine the shapes’ power, as do such details as the oddly curved window. In Euphoria (c 1970) a reddish heartlike blob floats before a brown field, but a few extra protuberances and indentations prevent us from reading it as a realistic heart. Hovering in front of the heart is something that looks like a square piece of wood with swaths of hair or leaves emerging from it. All these elements contradict one another–nothing quite fits. The shapes can’t be read according to our ordinary experience, pulling us away from the known in the same way a window view pulls us out of a room.
Brad Durham’s 37 paintings at Carrie Secrist all assert the power of the objects depicted, mostly birds. A Californian, Durham was introduced to art as a child by an elderly neighbor who took him to the beach, where they would paint seascapes while Durham’s single mom worked. Nature remains a primary inspiration: “I think nature reflects the truth of this planet,” he says. He thinks of these works as opposed to traditional landscapes, where we’re encouraged to view the land from “a safe distance.” Instead he says he wanted to take the viewer inside the forest: “I think of the birds as messengers of an intimate knowledge.”
The works in Lange’s “Puzzle Pieces” series, represented by five of his nine paintings here, consist of two or three panels differentiated from one another by color. In Puzzle No. 4, two horizontal rectangles display his characteristic lines, the top in black and the bottom in orange and black. These lines occasionally match up at the border between the panels, suggesting a jigsaw puzzle–but hardly ever match up between the vertical panels of Puzzle No. 5. Playing with connection and disconnection, these paintings clearly communicate that their puzzles will never be “solved,” or resolved into a picture. The changes in background color between the panels suggest rupture, as if life–or the world–could never be made whole again.
