Issue Number 124
January 23, 2004
Copyright C 2004, Charles Giuliano

Charles Giuliano is a Boston based artist, curator and critic. He is a contributor to Nyartsmagazine, and the director of exhibitions for The New England School of Art & Design at Suffolk University. He is represented by FLATFILESphotography GALLERY in Chicago.

Boston’s Newbury Street

Paul Rahilly, Figures and Still Lifes
Louis Risoli, New Paintings
Gallery Naga
67 Newbury Street, Boston, 02116
Through January 31

Maria Magdelena Campos-Pons
Howard Yezerski Gallery
238 Newbury Street, Boston, 02116
Through February 3

This selection of just three current exhibitions on Boston’s traditional gallery row, Newbury Street, represents just a tiny sample of what is currently on view there, and the nearby South End, but it touches on works and issues that cut to the heart of what art in Boston is about.

The exhibitions of paintings by Louis Risoli and Paul Rahilly, at Gallery Naga, and grids of Polaroid prints by Maria Magdalena Campos Pons, at Howard Yezerski Gallery, couldn’t be more diverse. But they are also paradigmatically Bostonian. Their commonality is a sense of depth, quality and humanistic value. Solid, well crafted pieces displaying a great knowledge of and respect for traditional values of modern and contemporary art. Nothing flimsy, trendy or fly by night here. It is the kind of work that Boston craves, produces and respects.

On the other hand, nothing particularly edgy or provocative. This is not the kind of work that shows up in the Whitney Biennial or in the hip emerging galleries of the art world’s epicenters. Although, the Cuban-born Campos Pons, has long been a staple on the international Biennial circuit. She is married to a Boston-based musician and has long thought of the city as her second home. Which also says something about the community and its vast attraction for an adopted citizenry of artists, academics, business and medical professionals attracted to its world-renowned institutions. To be a true Bostonian does not imply being born here.

Let us start then with the paintings of Paul Rahilly who most readily reflects the traditional values, indeed the conservative tendencies, of the Boston art world. It has been several years since we last saw an exhibition of his work at Gallery Naga where he has long been affiliated. Hirschl and Adler Gallery in New York City, which has had great success with the work, now represents him.

The manner and execution of his nude figures have always evoked comparisons to John Singer Sargent. There is a similar bravura love of the facile brush, lush highlights applied with glinting impasto, and broad layers of creamy pink paint slathered liked frosting on a wedding cake over sensual forms and flesh. But, there is also a kind of chilly distance from the nude, but hardly sensual figures. There is not the clinical coldness of Pearlstein, but there is a sense of sexual apathy. The figure is presented as a formal study and solved problem but it is a look but don’t touch approach. We are not seduced and enticed by the nudes. They are benign rather than erotic. This is not the withering gaze of Goya’s ersatz Duchess of Alba making us melt and quiver.

In the most interesting and controversial work in this show, The Belmont Women’s Club, a standing nude woman has her hands resting on the tips of angular hips. She looks down and away from us. Her body is indeed slender, well formed, and attractive but hardly enticing and sensual. It is just nude. Next to her is a generic, white plastic lawn chair. Over that is draped what we assume to be the blue and white dressing robe that she has just discarded. Three geese are meandering about. Rahilly often includes barnyard animals. Is this a post modern statement or just a quirk. Hard to say. But it clearly separates him from Sargent.

Behind this nude looms the façade of the Belmont Women’s Club. Just what is the woman doing posing nude in front of it? Does this say something about the club and its function? Did the artist actually work on site with a model?

These are, apparently, among the questions that the President of the club wanted to know. There was a phone call to the gallery and some threat of a potential lawsuit. When we discussed this possible legal action, the director of the gallery, Arthur Dion, seemed more amused than concerned.

More troubling, for me at least, is just how to deal with the work of Rahilly. Is it traditonal and even reactionary, academic painting? But that debate has been reconfigured by the critical responses to John Currin at the Whitney. It would be quite safe to argue that Rahilly is a better painter. Open and shut. But, is the work as interesting and provocative as that of Currin? Arguably not. It is a comparison of plastic lawn chairs and geese, vs. bra busting bimbos. No contest. Beyond that? But it is interesting that Currin has expanded a critical debate that allows us to look differently at well-schooled, figurative painters like Rahilly.

One truism of the Boston art world is its passion for painting. In that field and tradition, Louis Risoli has been a solid and respected exponent for what is turning into decades. My involvement with the work started with the Muscle Men series that he showed with the then Boston based, Stux Gallery. It was the hippest and most inspired stable of artists of its era and Risoli was a solid and enduring part of that legacy. When Stefan and Linda decamped for NY, indeed it has taken forever to recover from that loss, some of the best of their artists were taken on by other galleries. Louis has been with Arthur ever since steadily showing new work every couple of years.

A constant in the work, having left behind the abstracted muscle men (it would be great to pull them out for another look) has been a commitment to non objective imagery and a love of the material. His surfaces tend to be rich and juicy using a lot of medium with the pigment.

Another constant has been experimentation with the shape of the support. In the last body of work this took the form of large lozenge shapes with open centers. There was a lot of richly colored edge but an often-empty center revealing the wall to which the work was attached as a part of the space.

This latest show has him keeping the inventiveness of the shaped edge but not carving into the center. This has resulted in a greater surface mass and more complexity of the design. In discussion with the artist he also related the difference of an earlier approach of applying designs and patterns somewhat intuitively, encouraging improvisation and invention. Now the approach appears to be more deliberate. There is a sense of cris-crossed lines, skewed checkerboarding, which reflects the contours of the curving outer edges. This creates patterns of windows of color with a build up of layers of mottled color. The works are also very large and designed to come together as a grouping of interlocked elements. There is a heraldic or shield like preference in the forms. As though these were the family crests of some postmodern knights of the not so round table. Most of all, these works reflect a consistent sense of growth and progress. Yes, these paintings are richer and more satisfying than those of the last show. But there is also enormous integrity in all of the work of the past decades. This is an artist who deserves a museum retrospective.

While Boston is identified with a passion for all aspects of painting, it is ironic that its best known artists, particularly nationally and internationally, work in the field of photography (and studio furniture). There is also an affinity for producing work using the Polaroid process, which has its home base in Cambridge.

Campos Pons, or Magda as she is known to friends, is among a number of local artists who have worked with Polaroid technicians and their large format camera. This entails both possibilities and limitations. One part of this is that the work must be brought to and in front of the camera. Earlier pieces by the artist attempted to conflate both photographic imagery and a rooting in the body and performance as art. She did things in front of the camera and found ways to both use and disguise her presence and persona. There was a lot of role playing often reflecting a Cuban/ African tradition and iconography. These tended to be large single frame pieces that formed panoramic groupings. Prints of the self were juxtaposed with the other or object, perhaps a bird, flower, or something else that proved to be evocative. There was a spontaneous and experimental feeling to this work and an episodic element.

This latest body or work feels much more intense and resolved. It reflects greater planning and preparation of just what to bring to the session and camera. The two major pieces in the show entail edge to edge grids of individually framed elements of large format prints. There is a dominating blue work, a square of four by four elements. On the flanking wall is a horizontal work with a grid of three by four for a total of twelve frames.

In both cases, the grids are intended to be seen as a whole. Her upper torso head and strands of long matted hair descend from the upper edge down into the space of sky/ sea. Just where are we and what is the narrative implied? This is not clear but appears to matter less than the overall, aqueous grid and its floating body.

There appears to be more specific content and meaning implied in the large horizontal piece. Here there is a central, tall mannequin, with flowers where there should be a head. She is swathed in a patterned African cloth. Flanking the central figure are strands of African beads greatly enlarged. They are paired left and right to add up to four vertical strands in the center of the panels. The work is very symmetrical and classical in feeling and composition even though it evokes the tribal and Afrocentric. Perhaps this is the very essence of the sophistication and conflict of this artist who is rooted in her ethnicity and yet lives and works in the cold Brahmin north. The work evokes a longing as well as contentment. It reflects both the richness and loss of Diaspora. But, in that sense, aren’t we all really displaced persons. And isn’t great art often about absence and memory. Even here in chilly Boston. In every sense.