June 6,
2002
art
East
Meets Midwest
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Blue Veil (1998), 30 inches by 22
inches, monotype with mixed media." v:shapes="_x0000_i1026"> T.L.
Solien, Blue Veil (1998), 30 inches by 22 inches, monotype with mixed
media. |
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Wisconsin artist T.L. Solien
is featured in two gallery shows
this month.
T. L. Solien: Recent Paintings, through June 29, Esther M.
Klein Art Gallery, 3600 Market St., 215-387-2262; T. L. Solien: Works on
Paper Through July 6, The Print Center, 1614 Latimer St., 215-735-6090
Something about surrealism resonates with Midwestern
experience. The quintessential Midwestern artist T. L. Solien (who was born in
Fargo, N.D., and has resided in Minnesota, Iowa and now Madison, Wis., where he
teaches at the University of Wisconsin) has used it for the last 25 years to
capture a sense of alienation and fragmentation in strangely beautiful works
pervaded by dark humor. Solien�s smartly postmodern paintings and prints, now
on display in two different exhibition spaces in Philadelphia, show the
influence of isolated prairie landscapes, as well as the artist�s personal
history and emotional struggles. Though his work is well known in the Midwest,
and has been shown extensively in New York and elsewhere around the country,
this is its first exposure in Philadelphia.
Solien�s success in the art world in the 1980s and
subsequent reversals of fortune, as well as his adventures and frustrations
within academia, have provided plenty of raw emotions for subject matter in the
nine large, expressive oil-on-canvas paintings (and two smaller works on paper)
on display at the Klein Gallery. The paintings have recognizable images, drawn
from the history of art and cartoons, within abstract fields of somber colors
punctuated by bright raw tones. Several paintings are interpretations of the
traditional art of portrait painting that express the artist�s anxiety. In Weeping
Man (1998, 60" x 48") Solien has somehow flattened and smeared a
masculine face onto the canvas. Angular fragments of the face are linked
together in the center by a troubled reddish-brown area with a hand and blue
handkerchief pressed against it. The grimly humorous painting Driving to
Missouri (2001, 72" x 60") combines cartoon aspects of a human
face, including multiple eyes, some of them demarcated by Xs, and a set of
clenched teeth. As if autobiographical elements were mixed in a blender, we
also see a sodden, drippy mise-en-sc�ne with a hand, a steering wheel, a
series of oncoming headlights and several unaccountable splotches of
Pepto-Bismol pink.
Other paintings, such as Body and the Blood (2000,
48" by 60"), reveal the artist�s method of grafting abstracted images
of the figure and objects onto a pictorial format supplied by close readings of
Chardin and other still life painters. Fitted into a dark and shallow pictorial
space, cut glass goblets overlap in a haze of silvery light, while next to them
an amorphous fleshy shape oozes reddish dripping paint -- like a victim in a
slasher movie. The protagonist in Skate (2000, 48" x 60"), a
female doglike animal with a rounded blue human face, stands looking sideways
in a shallow neutral space covered with violet, yellow and brown brushstrokes.
The action-packed face contains six button eyes, a red clown nose, an open
mouth and is surrounded by a mass of yellow hair, while the creature�s
posterior is a swirl of raw, pink fleshiness inspired by Chardin�s painting of
a dead skate.
Meanwhile, across town in the Print Center�s first
floor space, 11 of Solien�s works on paper are also on display. Unlike the
dispiriting melancholy of many of the paintings, his monotypes and collages
(all about 30" x 22") are richly colorful and, while still dealing
with some of the troubling emotions in the paintings, much lighter in spirit.
The piece titled Laughing God/Smoking God (2000) even seems to
poke fun at the artist�s misfortunes. It has two collaged personae, made of a
duplicated child�s drawing of a head -- one with enormous blue feet and the
other hiding behind a pink oak leaf -- and a tall black shape in the center,
like a showerhead, appears to be spewing bits of debris and billowing smoke. In
Shit Ride (1998), an allegorical scene is played out even more
outrageously. A chipper little bluish creature with knobby horns and big eyes
stands expectantly at the front of a partially disassembled horse-drawn
carriage, over black brushstroke turds and surrounded by a reddish-gray
background as lovely as the sky before a bad storm.
In other pieces at the Print Center Solien more
delicately explores the shattered self using printed and collaged elements. The
textures of the paper and materials add twisted sensuality to the images in
these more intimate works. Infanta (1995-99) shows a female figure with
a large frothy yellow head and a small body with large breasts, no arms or
legs, and wheels for feet -- a novel reworking of a Velasquez portrait. In a
lovely and graphically powerful monotype, Blue Veil (1998), an irregular
blue shape and some sort of Asian calligraphic graffiti obscure a girl�s face.
In an especially entertaining twist, the one-eyed female figure in Age of
Pleasure, also made in 1998, has a disintegrating core contained by
(how fitting) a perky Mary Tyler Moore hairdo! Well worth seeing on their first
visit to Philadelphia, T. L. Solien�s paintings and monotypes are surreal and
bluntly funny -- postmodern disturbances of paint and color from America�s
heartland.
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