Charles Giuliano is a Boston based artist, curator and critic. He is a contributing editor of Art New England, and Nyartsmagazine, and the director of exhibitions for The New England School of Art and Design at Suffolk University. Recent issues of Maverick may be found at Retro Rocket.Com and East Boston.Com. He is represented by Flatfiles Gallery in Chicago, Gallery Gora in Montreal, and the Lyman-Eyer Gallery in Boston and Provincetown.

The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park
Lincoln, Massachusetts
June 8 through September 1

Curated by Nick Capasso, George Fifield, Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, Jennifer Uhrhane

Artists: Domingo Barreres, Bremner Benedict, Cynthia Consentino, Judy Haberl, Mario Kon, Michael Oatman, Scott Peterman, Anne Spileos Scott, Kenneth Speiser

Since its inception in 1989, the DeCordova Annual Exhibition, which opened last night to a full house, has evolved as the most consistent and prestigious effort to focus on all aspects of style and media currently being produced in the New England region. But the annual survey of emerging, mid career and established artists enjoys that status primarily through default. For a variety of reasons similar efforts at other institutions have been outright abandoned or dramatically modified.

Under its current director, Joseph Ketner, the Annual Lois Foster Exhibition of Boston Area Artists, at the Rose Art Museum has been abandoned. There has been a similar reduction of the number of exhibitions and a shift away from interest in local to national and international artists. Under the former director, Carl Belz, there were consistent acquisitions of regional artists, making it the most in depth and unique collection of its kind, but that policy appears to have ended. The much anticipated Brockton Triennial has been abandoned. Many were looking forward to the selections of a much admired young curator, Denise Markonish, but the Fuller Museum of Art has reconfigured itself as a museum devoted to aspects of crafts. The curator is said to be job hunting.

The Institute of Contemporary Art used to mount an annual, Boston Now, but has shifted to an annual Artist Prize that includes a one woman show and a gold watch, so to speak, this time awarded to a sculptor in fabricated wood, Taylor Davis, whose work is currently on view. The ICA’s female staff of director, Jill Medvedow, and, curator, Jessica Morgan, appear to favor women artists as is reflected in that emphasis in its programming. Well, after years of neglect and abuse, turnabout may indeed be fair play, but at the Museum of Fine Arts it is the official policy. The MFA, under its curator Cheryl Brutvan, bestows the annual Maud Morgan Award to a single female artist whose work is purchased for the collection. This year’s recipient, Laura Chasman, was a splendid, adventurous and much deserving selection. In correcting one oversight, however, the MFA seems to have created another. Perhaps one day they may get it right and consider at least one more artist annually, of whatever gender, for such endowed recognition.

And, let us not forget the annual Drawing Show of the Boston Center for the Arts. This year’s selection, curated by MIT curator, Bill Arning, was wildly eclectic, much debated and terrific fun.

Compared to the mainstream taste reflected by the DeCordova curatorial team, there are numerous opportunities to see fresh and provocative works in the Boston area in academic programs, fringe galleries and non profit spaces. Some of these include: Green Street, Oni, Montserrat College of Art, Hallspace, Emmanuel College, The Artist Foundation, FPAC Gallery, the Gallery of the Museum School, Tufts University, the Photographic Resource Center, Studio Soto, Space 12, Nao Project Gallery, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston Sculptors, The Art Institute of Boston, and the New England School of Art and Design.

It is precisely that range, diversity and vitality of work that is absent from this version of the DeCordova Annual. The problem may be deciphered from the museum’s catalog statement, "Each year’s show is carefully organized to reflect varieties of medium, style, subject and content, geographic diversity and a rough gender balance. All decisions are reached by consensus- all of the curators, as well as the director, must agree on the choice of each artist. This process seeks to ensure both breadth of scope (and taste), and a precise focus on excellence."

What seem to be mandated out of those ground rules are the crucial elements of passion and risk taking. The exhibition, by definition, is the result of committee work and compromise. Works and artists that managed to prevail through a number of straw votes and ballots; an exhibition as a kind of hung jury, with too many criteria for anything truly innovative to slip through. But, all work reflecting "excellence" whatever that means. And, perhaps most troubling, the same curatorial team has been essentially intact in the past 13 years. It would be nice now and then to feel the presence of an outside agitator to stir up the mix.

To be sure, this DeCordova Annual has arresting and powerful highlights. The exhibition has consistently proved to be a showcase and launching pad for other opportunities. From last year’s Annual, for example, Kelly Kaczynski is currently featured in a public art project at the ICA. And Kelly Heaton, a former fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, took her Furby animated art to New York where it was well received and reviewed in the Times.

For me, this Annual will long be remembered for presenting a recent series of truly magnificent, large format, poetic symbolist variations on the singular masterpiece of Spanish art, Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velasquez, by the Spanish born, Boston based artist, Domingo Barreres. The Boston School has long been noted for its great depth and commitment to aspects of painting and Barreres is on the very short list of its greatest practitioners in this medium.

Here we find the artist, now approaching his senior years, seemingly summarizing so many issues of adversity, disease, gender identity, fame, or lack thereof, vanitas, death, religion and horror all in a dialogue with the greatest Spanish artists from Velazquez to quotes from Goya, and the poet, Garcia Lorca, as well as references to the Prado’s Garden of Earthly Delights, by the Flemish master, Bosch..

One would be tempted to state that Barreres has appropriated or deconstructed the paradigmatic work of Velazquez. But the artist predates that generation when these philosophical ideas came to dominate the thinking of the academy. I see this work as more rooted in the traditions of the Symbolists. It is evident there in the mordant use of bituminous black, the love of delicate glazing and chiaroscuro, as well as the heat oppressed products of the mind, made mad by the most exquisite poetry, scrawled, combining both English and Spanish, one language conflating into the other, across the surface of the canvas. The text not to explain or be didactic but literally to expand and contextualize the poetry of the visual references.

Last night, I had the benefit of the artist offering a translation and running commentary on these great and mesmerizing works. Indeed, one might fill a book with words evoked by these variations, their sources, and iconography. But never hope to pin down the wit, insight and passion of the artist. Although visually diverse, some quite literal in reference to the original, and others rather oblique, the artist explained the connections. In one work, for example, is a hilarious full length standing, frontal self portrait as a Cardinal. On the breast of his cassock is the same symbol of the order of a cabbalero that the artist proudly displayed on his tunic in his great masterpiece. Barreres explained that the artist had painted the complex portrait of the Infanta precisely to gain that knighthood through lies and deceptions despite not being of noble birth. The artist then conflates this with his own similar schemes for nobility and recognition. To underscore the connection, during the opening, he wore a black shirt with small red buttons, emulating the black cassock and red buttons of a Cardinal, that he had painstakingly sewn on. His humor is delicious.

This wicked, mischievous side is also evident in one of the works that reconfigures the pose of the standing Infanta but as a prepubescent nude boy in a glade of morning glories and scrub oak bushes. These are references to the flora and fauna of the small town where the artist spends time abroad. Because of recent scandals in the Church people have asked the artist if this is a statement on pedophelia. Was this a reference to having been molested as a child? With a twinkle the artist conveyed that as much as he had wanted this as a boy it had, "unfortunately," never happened. He added that the series had started in September when he returned from summer in Spain and before the Church scandals that have dominated the media. He promises more works in this ongoing series.

In the category of mid career and established artists there were strong works by Judy Haberl and Mario Kon. While known as a sculptor Haberl has made a dramatic incursion into photography. In reality she has created sculptures, encased in enormous blocks of ice, and then photographed them using the Moby C 40 x 90" Polaroid camera. The result is epic scaled, one of a kind works in horizontal format. The imagery is stunning but the range of color so limited that one wonders why the process has to be color Polaroid photography. Might this work have been created in some other technique without diminishing their impact? In this latest series of works Kon, also a sculptor, has produced a series of reliefs involving the selective cutting away of the veneers of lamination in plywood. The artist has created illusionistic, perspective forms and shapes in some works while piling up layers of the removed materials in an additive process in others.

The portfolio of color studies of fishing ice houses, shot during winters on lakes in Maine, by Scott Peterman, were exquisite. The artist prefers to photograph on hazy overcast days when contrasts are minimal. This creates a still and mysterious aura to the forms that read as minimalist sculptures. The black and white photographs by Bremner Benedict incorporating the serendipitous results of a plastic Holga camera proved not to be particularly engaging.

It is understandable that the content rich collages by Michael Oatman, in this case something about lots of exotic birds and guns, have attracted serious curatorial attention, but I failed to relate to the material. I have been more attracted to similar themes in works by artists including Alexis Rockman, Jess, and Ashley Bickerton.

Mea culpa, but I also proved too distant from the installation by the much respected artist, Anne Spileos Scott, the recipient of the 2001 Rappaport Prize, awarded by the DeCordova. The work, involving a room with furniture, family photographs, memorabilia and an edited video, references her deceased mother and her ethnic heritage. I recently lost my own mother and should, accordingly, have been more sensitized to the content, but I just couldn’t, or wouldn’t, don’t ask me why, make the connection.

Quite frankly, I found the works by Cynthia Consentino, ceramic, anthropomorphic figures evoking fairy tales, and the sequined finger print, "Self Portraits," by Kenneth Speiser, oddly irritating. The more I attempted to engage these works the less I liked them. Just why, again, is a bit difficult to pin down.

So, there you have it. And, as Red Sox fans say, "There’s always next year," with its hope of another DeCordova Annual.