At first I thought it was a practical joke: a thumb-sized ceramic bird tucked in a box of teabags in my kitchen cupboard. Instead, it turned out to be a promotional gimmick for the tea company, which would have us collect " all 10 porcelain miniatures of endangered North American animals! " Imagine.
More unexpected still was the way my petite peregrine falcon flew to my rescue — helping to answer a question that’s been bothering me all week after a recent stroll down Newbury Street. Why did so much of the disappointing art I’d seen feel like reassurance, with its seamless composition and air of contrived peacefulness? Why did the representational work tend to the gentle and familiar while the abstract work inclined to the meditative and pretty? Why porcelain miniatures of endangered species and not dog breeds or state birds?
Then it hit me that what the least successful art and the porcelain miniatures have in common is, for lack of a better word, compensation. Much, though fortunately not all, of the art I took in appears designed to replace life’s turmoil with calm, disturbance with resolution, disorder with exactitude. In the same way, the tiny, shiny manatee and sturgeon and Florida panther fill the void of the real animals’ near-extinction with the plenitude of inanimate, assembly-line evocations.
Compensation cuts two ways. On one hand, it satisfies, however naively, the need to escape difficulty. On the other hand, it comes dangerously close to deceit.
Deceit is decidedly what you do not feel about " Gunnar Norrman: Rhythm of Light " at the Pucker Gallery, where the whispery drawings and prints of the octogenarian Swedish artist are on display. Not a lot has changed in Norrman’s palette over the last half-century, from the earliest work in the exhibit (1945) to the most recent (2000). The flora — trees and marsh grass and Queen Anne’s lace — remains unchangingly fragile and refined. And the panoramas, whether of boats in harbors or distant cities or formations of telephone poles, remain as austere and motionless as Japanese flower arrangements. So, too, the modest scale of the work stays constant (the pieces mostly measure in at nine by six inches), as does its narrow color range — shades of gray and black and white.
So what’s the big deal? Poetry, for one thing, and the artist’s insistence on the quiet pleasure of the natural world. Norrman isn’t making an argument about what’s left of the environment to enjoy; he’s simply enjoying. In less attentive and accomplished hands, these bucolic conté and charcoal scenes could read as saccharine and precious, a schoolgirl’s pressed flowers. Instead, they register as peculiarly vital, as if battling their own evanescence.
Nothing could seem farther removed from Norrman’s gentle, controlled, Spartan imagery than the exhibit down the street at Gallery NAGA. This duo show features Valerie Claff’s dramatic, red abstract paintings and David Prifti’s oversized photo transfers of old black-and-white family snapshots onto such things as picket fences and large scraps of rusted metal. Yet what Norrman and Claff and Prifti share is a brooding forlornness and a sense that the composure they capture in their art stands at the far edge of well-being. In other words, they’re edgy.
Claff’s " Fire and Water " might better have been called " Fire and Smoke. " Each of her frames suggests a smoldering forest seen from the height of a firefighting plane. The feel is less ominous than inevitable — no flames lick the canvas, no choking billows of smoke pour forth. Instead, we get swaths of steady, slow burn. To her credit, Claff’s best work is her largest. The one towering painting in the show sees the colors grow startlingly crisp, and she orchestrates the composition with a greater boldness than in her smaller frames.
David Prifti’s " Passage " finds the artist moving in subtly new directions. Prifti’s signature approach to his mixed-media creations involves enlarging some part of an amateur, vintage photograph, of the sort you find in old family albums, and then transferring the image to a roughly textured found object. In " Passage " he has begun to play with more than just the torn and troubled surfaces to which he applies his old photos — he’s now playing with the images themselves, creating one face from two sources, superimposing a fragment of a face against a backdrop of multiple visages, sequencing different faces along the length of a picket fence so they read like weird cinema. In Incarnate, the same face splits down the middle, with each half superimposed on different surfaces. Further, the face is divided across time: the old self appears on the left, and the same person, but smooth and youthful, appears to the right. In Passage, a close-up of an old man’s eyes and nose and mouth stares out at you from the center of a backdrop of young sailors in uniform, among whom you’re invited to imagine he stands.
Prifti’s Proustian manipulations, the way he assembles images to allow multiple moments in one person’s life to occur together, achieve their greatest impact when the surface resonates with the imagery. In Sound, for instance, the round face of a boy, now a man or an old man, appears on the rusted, stippled surface of a hubcap. It’s amazing, like a face looking out from a mirror that reflects backward in time.
Further down toward Arlington Street, a group show of established and emerging glass artists at the Chappell Gallery offers an engaging counterpoint. " Crossroads " features the work of 11 artists who hail from Australia and New Zealand, and the best work here reminds me of certain animal species from Down Under, strangely voluptuous forms that look simultaneously familiar and otherworldly. Significant are the spherical creations of Ben Sewell, who goes after perfect glass globes the size of candlepin bowling balls the way Dr. Frankenstein went after fecundity. Sewell’s glistening, symmetrical surfaces initially seem as uncomplicated as Christmas ornaments or bud vases. Gradually you realize that what looks like a residue of masking tape or a patch of Velcro on one sphere’s surface is actually embedded in the glass. Not only that, but if you turn the globe around, you discover the same blemish on the opposite side. The effect is hushed but poignant, like something coming to life.
Outstanding, too, are Nicole Chesney’s confections of painted glass and glass and wax. Although Chesney’s luminous gray horizontal glass boxes — they suggest sun behind clouds — enjoy the appeal of the end of a summer rain, her glass-and-wax diptych is even more captivating. Here, glass appears to be folding away from two muted square wall mountings, like a pair of giant scales peeling from sections of a fish. The image reads as both natural and industrial, the exfoliation of a machine.
It’s probably not a coincidence that the most successful exhibits on Newbury Street this month are not American in sensibility. Norrman’s drawings bespeak his native Sweden, Prifti’s imagery lies close to his Albanian roots, Claff’s abstractions emerge from her experiences in Turkey, and the glass artists at the Chappell Gallery reflect the efforts of displaced Europeans. Perhaps when we’re ready to embrace our shattered world, the need to compensate will give way to a fuller ability to express.
