Although Ellen Lanyon left Chicago years ago to continue her career in New York, she is still moved by what might be termed the Windy City's quotidian surrealism. At least this was the impression one had in looking at this show's centerpiece, "Archaic Gardens," a series of 12 large oils loosely based on the signs of the zodiac.
Each canvas of "Archaic Gardens" follows a similar format.Lyrics - Song Lyrics The bottom three-quarters of the composition depicts a wall from which figures are emerging. Some of them are stuck in low relief, while others seem about to burst into three-dimensional life. Hovering in front of the wall are ghostly white forms, usually plants or flowers, sometimes fish or birds. Floating in the skies above the wall are mysterious biomorphic forms reminiscent of protozoans viewed under a microscope. Avoiding any hint of impasto, Lanyon paints in oil diluted almost to the consistency of wash. The ghostly foreground figures could almost be done in white felt pen, so sure is the brush stroke.
Throughout the series, traditional astrological symbols make discreet appearances alongside more modern iconography.penis enlargement - penis enlargement pills The work for the sign of Leo, for example, has a lion's head and, next to it, a woman in a 1950s bathing suit crouched to dive. Other paintings depict fish, animals and plants in similar juxtapositions.
The artist initially conceived "Archaic Gardens" as four triptychs corresponding to the four seasons, but the paintings worked well as 12 individual canvases, which is how they were shown here. Equally spaced along one wall, nine of them marched down the gallery, turning at the far wall for the final three canvases which, with their harvested fruits and cruciform imagery, had distinct funereal connotations.
Also in the show were 42 12-inch-square egg tempera paintings depicting actual gardens in Massachusetts, Italy and Costa Rica. A couple of these gardens, adorned with odd statues or topiary, have a fantastical air. Overlaid on these half-natural, half-artificial scenes are more of Lanyon's ghostly drawings, this time of enigmatic devices. Just as gardens represent nature tamed by human desires, in these works Lanyon seems to domesticate Surrealism by yoking together strange partners in an almost blissful fashion.
Detroit-based Stephen Magsig comes to Manhattan's downtown facades after years of painting his home town in its various phases of decline, and he seems in awe of the pronounced life-beat pulsing through Gotham's streets.
Magsig does not bother too much with technical wizardry, nor does he adopt the flat, deadpan approach of the Photo-Realists. Rather, he depicts the buildings with feeling; if Edward Hopper had painted close-ups f the entranceways and surrounding facades of an unpeopled Cast-Iron District, the results might well have looked like this. Like Hopper, Magsig uses architecture to tell the story of its own being (see Hopper's Early Sunday Morning); light and shadow, shades of color and architectural detail all speak for themselves. He is sure-footed in what he is doing, which may have something to do with his "day job" as a commercial illustrator. Take, of instance, Caffe Roma. As is typical of Little Italy's light-deprived streets, it's impossible to make out the time of day; a sign advertising Italian ices is almost completely in shadow. The entrance, with its short flight to steps and glass doors leading to the restaurant, is lit from above, as if evening were approaching, or already there. The sense is strong that Magsig is telling a story with his creamy brushstroke and low-keyed color, a story without people, without narrative but with multiple painterly incidents marking its plot, and with light and dark in dialogue.
Unless Magsig's doorways advertise themselves penis enlargement(as do Caffe Roma and Fanelli), we often have a sense of not knowing where we are, of being in a kind of generic Little Italy of SoHo. He often cuts through this anonymity by naming a street in his title, and sometimes the cross-street as well. Crosby Garage is, for all the outsized ugliness of its square, gaping maw and battered windows, esthetically delightful in its sincerity and in its capacity to transmute city blight into visual gold, right down to the flecks of yellow paint underneath the windows indicating, in a most plastic way, where the paint on the building is peeling.
Magsig remains an unflinching realist while detecting a beauty in Manhattan streets that may escape those of us who live here. His most recent work features zoom-lens close-ups of cornices and disjunctive window-glass reflections, always approached at the oddest angles. Magsig has a right to experiment; still, I prefer the less baroque, more romantic whole facades, the better to remind us, without distortion, of what New York still has to offer.