Emily Rapport, Phase I (Advocate General), 30 x 40, 2023
Three very different approaches to an aesthetic of ordinary American daily life - by three painters with much in common: white, local, female, aged 45-65. As gallery text reminds us, this is the kind of show one might have seen a hundred years ago. Well -- that show would have had male artists — but there’s a few other differences as well:
Karen Perl’s update on Edward Hopper’s urban desolation is even more desolate - perhaps because the urban architecture has not changed. It’s just become less real - less substantial- dream-lit instead of sun-lit. More like a fading memory than a slice of life. And it’s inevitably accompanied by a lone, lanky canine companion instead of people. Hopper’s paintings said "this is America". Perl’s say "this is my world" - and it's ghostly.
Gwendolyn Zabicki is also an American scene painter - though more in the tradition of street photography than figurative painting. She captures candid, instantaneous personal moments - as if with the click of a shutter and the camera’s single point-of-view. The images feel fresh and unexpected- for example: a man testing the firmness of cooked pasta as glimpsed through a kitchen window. The paintings do not feel as clinical and journalistic as photography - but neither do they go very far into painterliness. The narrative subject is everything. This is magazine illustration.
And that’s how the paintings of Emily Rapport are way different: subject is still important- but no more so than the painted surface. And her subject is remarkable: the everyman city. Not the show-places like Millennium Park - or the glass canyons of the Loop - or the architectural gems of the elite. She paints the neighborhoods where most people live — and usually she paints them as they are being built or repaired. And so she celebrates ordinary urban life - while not forgetting the constant care it takes to maintain. No reference to gender or ethnic identity. No participation in the discourses of contemporary art theory. Not even a whiff of irony or aloof alienation. Just love of our social fabric. (That which extremists of every persuasion are so eager to tear asunder )
And yet her painterliness is no less remarkable. Her pieces show a greedy appetite for space, luminosity, and graphic energy. They could not have been done before Cezanne, but they seem to be innocent of their Modernism. They just use whatever is available to tell their story.
Emily Rapport, Ivy Covered House, 44 x 48, 2023
Here is my favorite of the large pieces - no humans are present -and yet they are everywhere. A wonderful place to share a few beers - as well as a composition challenged by a vertical line right up the center - which I didn’t notice for the first ten viewings. What I did notice was the wacky twisting space of the stairway, and how it contrasted with the other, more placid vertical zones. I feel inebriated just looking at it.
Emily Rapport, Vacant Lot, 24 x 28, 2015
Here’s my favorite of the smaller pieces - and again she’s challenged the design by emphasizing the center. What’s different, however, is the melancholy mood. There’s something so sad about a dark, neglected, empty space in the neighborhood
It’s not that the Zabicki and Perl paintings aren’t worth seeing. They both offer a clear path into how they feel about a world they know so well. But Rapport gives us more of what Old Master paintings once did: a vision of social order as validated by the power of formal organization - running down into each mark on the canvas. More is at stake.
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Mention should also be made of the institution that hosted this show - the Cleve-Carney Gallery of the College of DuPage. Like the Koehnline museum of Oakton Community College to the north, it often presents contemporary art free of the ideological dogma that governs the art museums of the Chicago area’s major universities (Northwestern, University of Chicago, DePaul).
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Dmitry Samarov also reviewed the show for the Chicago Reader.
