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Gems
David Sullivan’s " Cézanne " drawings at Genovese/Sullivan; inspired jewelry at Mobilia
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

" Structure Before Image "
At Genovese/Sullivan Gallery, 47 Thayer Street, Boston, through April 3.
" Jewelry from Painting "
At Mobilia Gallery, 358 Huron Street, Cambridge, through March 30.


There’s an oceanic, mesmerizing quality to David Sullivan’s display of drawings in his current exhibit at the Genovese/Sullivan Gallery. Inside the high-ceilinged space, 40 pictures, unframed and arranged in columns, rise up salon-style on the wall to the right like the surge of tremendous surf; they register as simultaneously decorous and overwhelming. On the opposite wall, the surf has crashed — a single drawing and a quasi-triptych (actually a diptych with a closely positioned third image) occupy a similar large space.

The oceanic effect is achieved not just by the syncopating rhythm of the overall display but also by the internal nature of Sullivan’s compositions. Each of the many small graphite drawings on the right wall suggests a tidal pool — multi-faceted, interlocking, almost abstract elements undulate, like self-contained worlds. In fact, all the show’s drawings call to mind intricate mosaics, since each appears composed of separate, irregular, pencil-drawn " tiles " whose movements and forms have been orchestrated into a larger design.

If the designs often look vaguely familiar, there’s a reason. A great number, but not all, of Sullivan’s drawings represent translations of paintings by Paul Cézanne. " Flat sculpture, " a term Sullivan coined to describe the work, describes his third exhibit over the last few years in which he’s put forward his own pursuit of Cézanne’s vision and technique. The quest began as pure study, an investigation into the great post-Impressionist’s revolutionary reconfigurations of space. By creating graphite versions of Cézanne’s oils, Sullivan was able to expose otherwise hidden aspects of their composition. His previous exhibit, " Very Late Cézanne, " went beyond study to appropriation, and it lived in that awkward space between dependence and independence, mentor and protégé. Several of the frames in " Very Late Cézanne " were attached to motors that made them rotate a full 180 degrees every so often — the point being that the dynamism and the " meaning " of the forms were independent of their having identifiable content.

Describing the fusion, spiritual and stylistic, of transferring Edgar Allan Poe’s writing into French, Charles Baudelaire famously observed, in the process of translating, " I am Edgar Allan Poe. " So, too, with " Structure Before Image " : David Sullivan has become Paul Cézanne. These are no longer Cézanne-inspired works but entirely Sullivan’s own. I was drawn into the exhibit first by its trance-like rhythm. If Sullivan were a composer, he’d have to be Philip Glass — only the subtlest variations occur across pieces that are in many ways identical. I was further drawn in by the sense of witnessing Sullivan’s discoveries and his unfolding technical mastery, and I was mildly surprised that my interest never spilled over into wanting to see any of the " original " Cézannes.

The first work — Green Dogs, the one on the left as you enter — goes back almost a decade, to a time before Sullivan discovered his idée fixe. Seeing it, you can envision the precipice on which he stood before his years-long fall into Cézanne. The drawing hovers on complete abstraction; had I not seen another Sullivan painting based on the same imagery, the fact that a dog splashes in a forest stream would be lost on me. It is possible to distinguish the flora from the fauna, the animal from the water, the water from the foreground, the sky from the trees. But it’s not easy, and in some ways that’s the point. Like Cézanne before him, Sullivan is interested in the ironic and resonant tension between content and structure, between the representational and the ideational, between the world of our senses and the principles that underlie our experience of that world. It’s a Platonic obsession. By articulating so many planes in the visual field, the lush, romantic, unprepossessing scene (with a dog, no less!) becomes something else entirely: a piece of visual music masquerading as chain mail, the quotidian made magical. Precisely where and when, the artist seems to be asking, do we tell the dancer from the dance?

Ask Sullivan about the diptych on the same wall and he’ll tell you it isn’t fully realized since he was after a uniformity in value that eluded him. Maybe so, but that doesn’t matter; it’s spellbinding. The work depicts a still life, fruit on a bolt of cloth, that’s based on Cézanne’s painting Still Life with Jug, Curtain and Competoire. And though each of the two frames (and the nearby third) measures the same, and though the two depict the same exact objects, they come across not simply as identical but also as distinct. For one thing, they’re on different-colored paper; for another, the highlighting, particularly the use of white pencil, distinguishes them. Above all are the differences in attention, as Sullivan articulates aspects of one and not the other while keeping the imagery the same. The effect approaches trompe-l’œil; you can’t tell whether the artifice lies in the flatness or in the dimensionality — the image’s ability to create an illusion of space even as it asserts its flatness.

In the gallery’s large inner room, entire walls are given over to single works — virtually no other Boston gallery demonstrates such sensitivity to the demands of seeing. Among my favorites there is Grey Mont Ste. Victoire Seen from Bellevue. After you’ve scrutinized image upon image of tightly woven, complex, interior still lifes, the sight of trees and an expansive vista feels like emerging out of a long subway tunnel on a bright spring day. Suddenly you can see far away.

IF EVER AN EXHIBIT had an opposite, then the opposite of " Structure Before Image " has to be the group show at the Mobilia Gallery in Cambridge, " Jewelry from Painting. " Eighty jewelers from around the world have created brooches and bracelets, pins and earrings, rings and necklaces, all inspired by paintings. (Reproductions of the paintings are exhibited near each piece.) Alas, there’s not a Cézanne-inspired bauble in sight. Still, you’ve got your pin in the shape of a fish trailed by its own entrails by jeweler Dave Freda after an image by Hieronymus Bosch (from The Temptation of St. Anthony). You’ve got what looks like a miniature infrared photo of Leonardo’s The Last Supper embedded in a sculpted sterling bracelet by a jeweler who calls herself Roy. (Check out her Warhol-inspired Jackie O. bracelet for more secular kicks.) You’ve got a cluttered, mostly abstract " neckpiece " that mimics the goings-on in the middle of Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein, courtesy of Eila Minkkinen. (The neckpiece comes complete with a silver hand that extends from its confection of laminate and spectrolite in the same attitude as Stein’s hand resting in her lap.) And you’ve got lots else you’d never expect, like Kiff Slemmons’s Bear Claw Necklace (after White Cloud of the Ioways, by George Caitlin), which I’d swear is made from old stove or toaster dials.

But the moment you’re convinced " Jewelry from Painting " qualifies as incontrovertible camp extravaganza, you discover the tender, exquisite work of Todd Reed, whose brittle gold and diamond bracelet was inspired by the dress in Klimt’s Portrait of Emilie Flöge. (Klimt, who worked frequently with gold leaf in his oils and whose brother was a jeweler, is by far the painter of choice in the show — at least five jewelers drew on his paintings for ideas.) No less exquisite are Flora Book’s Klimt-inspired bracelet and necklace, which look like a cross between ribbon candy and railroad tracks with their thin, gently colored glass ties traveling between parallel lengths of sterling silver.

One of the highlights is Zelia Nobre’s contribution of two bracelets and a set of rings. The painting that inspired her work is Rembrandt’s The Syndics, which many still associate with the lid of Dutch Masters cigarboxes. The Syndics depicts a group of six men posing for the 17th-century Dutch equivalent of a stockholders’ meeting. In Nobre’s recasting, the visages (hats, searing eyes, facial hair) of the cloth-guild leaders are reproduced as the centerpieces of six oversized rings. Her bracelets are more austere affairs, hefty pieces of wrist armor with six round holes punched out. Were you to lay the bracelet out flat, the holes would correspond with the heads of the burghers in the painting. It’s not just a hoot, it’s also a comment — both homage and send-up.

Issue Date: March 21-28, 2002
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