The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Entertainment
     

             THURSDAY, SEPT. 22, 2005 
           
                  Art, pure and simple; Stetson opens exhibit 

                  By LAURA STEWART 
                  Fine Arts Writer 

                  Last update: September 18, 2005 

                  DELAND -- Every so often, an exhibition comes along that is 
                  just about perfect. That's the case with the season-opener at 
                  Stetson University's Duncan Gallery of Art, a gem of a show 
                  whose name could not be less imaginative.
                  Maybe the idea was to put the focus firmly on those artists. 
                  Still, it is the art that counts in "Steve Aimone, Ryan 
                  Burkhart, Carla Poindexter," and those artists' paintings add 
                  up to one serious display, in three parts. Unlike group 
                  exhibits that illustrate a theme, hanging works in a pleasing 
                  ensemble, Stetson's show just lays it out, one fine artist at 
                  a time, in the cavernous Duncan Gallery.
                  Start at your left after you enter double doors, and you are 
                  plunged into a world of spinning, whirling shapes that seem to 
                  exist in their own quirky, poetic space.
                  Poindexter borrowed from mad science, cartoons and surrealist 
                  Paul Klee to create acrylic-on-canvas crazy quilts of oozing 
                  amoebas, manic traffic cones, feathery whorls and other 
                  flights of fantasy. Adding to the whimsy, and to the peculiar 
                  power of her remarkable illusions, are names like "Mooky or 
                  the Story of a Sad Little Boy" or, for a row of five sharp, 
                  wickedly neat burrs set against a flat-black backdrop, "Shade 
                  Coming."
                  Just as enigmatic, and as brilliantly executed are paintings, 
                  prints and drawings by Burk-hart, like Poindexter a member of 
                  the University of Central Florida art faculty. They also seem 
                  to refer to the real world, partly through lyrical titles and 
                  partly by suggesting a myriad of half-recognized vistas. In 
                  "Untitled (Babble)," ripples of color cover the canvas like a 
                  close-up view of a waving flag. Its small squares of pastel 
                  pigments are applied so thinly that they highlight the 
                  canvas's woven texture, underlining their quality as fabric.
                  At the same time, however, the uneven color blocks in a 
                  painting whose subtitle is a reminder of ancient Babylon, with 
                  its tower of chaotic voices, suggest quilt patches and, an 
                  equally rich possibility, fields of flowers seen from an 
                  aerial perspective. The point in Burkhart's recent works, as 
                  it was in Poindexter's, is that while any interpretation is OK 
                  -- the art, after all, needs the observer's reaction to be 
                  complete -- it's just as possible that none of them is 
"right."
                  Instead, as the breathtaking wall of 12 small abstractions by 
                  Aimone, a Brooklyn-trained artist who moved several years ago 
                  from DeLand to Asheville, N.C., makes clear, these are not so 
                  much works about something they suggest, or a recognition they 
                  spark in their viewers, as they are about themselves, pure and 
                  simple. Poindexter's complex fields are illusionistic tours de 
                  force, dazzling visual pyrotechnics of space, form and depth, 
                  and Burkhart's preoccupation is with luminous tints that 
                  reveal random textures.
                  Aimone's precise calligraphic essays in pigment on paper are 
                  even more tightly constructed. Elegant and spare, the action 
                  of the artist's brush as it moved over his very ordinary 
                  material is what catches the viewer's eye and holds his 
                  attention. In "#10 from the series 'Accumulations and 
                  Dissipations,' " the folds of a rough paper bag are readily 
                  visible. Over them, with control that seems in some places to 
                  dance and others to slow to an agonized, doubt-filled drag, 
                  loosely worked pigment tracks the artist's fleeting process as 
                  he follows his impulses.
                  Rich, elemental and deeply moving, Aimone's gestures are his 
                  art. What remains, to hang on gallery walls, is a taut, 
                  brilliantly balanced series of images. But what counts in his 
                  dozen "Accumulations and Dissipations" -- and what is most 
                  vivid in "AD-II," the large brown-paper painting that hangs 
                  from pushpins -- is the artist's action, particularly when the 
                  actions are as forceful as those in Stetson's new show: art 
                  for art's sake.


                 



      |  © 2005 News-Journal Corporation   |   news-journalonline.com (SM)   |   
      Our privacy policy   |   Terms of Service  |