EUTOPIA

Tom Motley & Liz Trosper

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Tom Motley & Liz Trosper
FLUID DIALOG
Bernice Coulter Templeton Gallery, Fort Worth [link]
January 16-March 8, 2018

Motley and Trosper collaborate in an age-old painting tradition that has largely fallen out of favor, a material call and response.  While vastly different in method and style, formal fragments bounce across the gallery and the result is a splashy dialog. Motley’s larger works act as topographical spaces: simultaneously an electrified plane of light and a rich, stained color field. Paint as a material is the actual subject of Trosper’s paintings, rendered through several generations of digital and liquid applications. This palimpsest process heightens the ephemeral nature of an object historically associated with permanence.

~ Sara Cardona
images courtesy of the author

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George Grammer

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George Grammer, New York Nocturnal, n.d., oil on canvas, 35.5 X 25.25 “ Collection of Judge and Mrs. B. Michael Chitty

 

George Grammer
Full Circle 
Bernice Coulter Templeton Art Studio [link]
Texas Wesleyan University, Ft. Worth, TX

Grammer’s 1950’s night paintings of Texas coastal derricks and refineries helped develop his masterful touch for suggestive twilight. The later New York Nocturnal softens industrial lights and edges, even blurring colors as if a precursor of a Gerhard Richter technique. It is an exhilarating image, with the insertion of a bold horizontal streak, like a speeding Yellow Cab.

Sunflower Night has the contour-clarity of an Aubrey Beardsley woodcut. The tall stems, looming high above the viewer, dim into ever darker tones. Yet Grammer retains significant warm hues in the elliptical flowers, letting them project forward from the rich blue sky.

~ Thomas Motley
photos courtesy of BB Moncrief Wiese and Carter Bowden, Curators
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Corwin Levi

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Corwin Levi
The Unfinding
VisArts, Rockville, Maryland [link]

While some art heightens our sense of reality, Corwin Levi’s latest show “The Unfinding” opens the door to the unknown. Levi eschews horizons in favor of submersion. The effect? We drown in stars, waves, and words. Place and time remain mysterious. These paintings evoke maps and star charts, but there are no legends or grids. There is no compass rose to help us orient ourselves. Lines, resembling roads, lead nowhere. Words offer little direction. Though some storybook figures and waves seem familiar, the appropriated skillfully merges with the invented to create a unique experience, one that embraces mystery over answers.

~ Michelle Aldredge

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Mauro Martinez

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In The Event of A Water Landing. Oil on canvas. 66"x66"

Mauro Martinez “In The Event of A Water Landing” Oil on canvas. 66″x66″

 

Mauro Martinez
In The Event of A Water Landing
Oil on canvas [2016]

Anchored by a fractured protagonist lost in a Bacon-esque pretense of depth, Martinez establishes a familiarity of painting as angst reflector. The ruptured figure in this delicatessen of discontent dissolves amidst a riot of graphic and painterly styles generating a necessary confusion: a frenetic saccadic movement. Familiar fragments of cautionary travel symbols quasi-pleading for pseudo-safety amplify this visual unsettling, generating a malcontent nausea. Declaring the distress of the physical flâneur (damn the static Internet voyeur) recalls the painful physicality required for painting and cultural absorption, a discomfiting reminder of our existential anxiety mirrored by corporeal un-belonging.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of the artist

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