Entre Horizontes : Art and Activism between Puerto Rico and Chicago

A review of  Entre Horizontes: Art and Activism Between Chicago and Puerto Rico 

at The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

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 Arnaldo Roche Rabell (1955-2018) Aqui y alla  (Here and There),1989 

There is no indication online that Rabell identified as gay - but four beefy guys cavorting on a boat at night off the coast of Chicago’s north side seems like that kind of theme.  They’re naked and certainly burning with something - probably desire. Rabell’s technique is incomprehensible to me.  He somehow wrapped a paint loaded canvas around  unclothed models. Nevertheless,  the results are quite powerful.  Obviously he made just the right alterations. And probably he was some kind of magician.

Armaldo Roche Rabell ,  Isla Vacia, (vacant island), 1987

More magic from Rabell - a memento mori still-life combined with an aerial cityscape of what must be San Juan -  and the all-too empty chairs.  He's quite passionate about the loss.

Angel Otero (b. 1981), Exquisito, 2009 

This is the kind of work Otero was doing right after he got his MFA at SAIC and was shown at the Chicago Cultural Center.  It recalls the home of his grandmother.  Like Rabell, it drips with sensuality, and it’s a kind of collage.  Otero uses scraped off paint skins.  A cool, distant, objective view of these things (all things?) is not possible. It’s all about emotion.

Candida Alvarez (b. 1955), Licking  a Red Rose, 2020

This piece is from the MCA’s own collection - and I can see why they acquired it.  It’s gorgeous. Signage tells us that it refers to the 2020 election as well as a friend licking a rose. But I think it’s just about Candida's joy of being alive.

Jose Lerma (b. 1971). Dorothy, 2023

As this photo shows, this is quite a large piece.

The artist used a special broom to brush thick acrylic paint across burlap.

It depicts Dorothy Dene, purportedly a model for Luis A. Ferre’s great gift to the museum in Ponce, Puerto Rico, ‘Flaming June’

Lord Leighton, Flaming June, 1895

Lerma has hinted at some ideological content behind his current work - as there was in his spoof of international banking in his show at Kavi Gupta ten years ago (Here is my review)

But gallery signage doesn’t mention it  - so I take it as just an update on the theme of stately young women - suitable now for a corporate headquarters instead of a mogul’s mansion.

It has the pleasant aesthetic of a quilt or soft sculpture.

Sebastian Vallejo ( b. 1982) Esperando La Tormenta, 2017

Signage tells us that the artist painted this in NewYork while Hurricane Maria was devastating Puerto Rico.  For me, it has the excitement of Van Gogh - so I’m not sure that his reaction was one of despair or anxiety.

…and apparently the MCA thought it was decorative enough for a pillow

Vallejo appeared in a show of young artists at the Puerto Rican Community Center in 2016

and I mentioned him here

Sebastian Vallejo, Paseo por la Costa (walk along the coast), 2020

Vallejo would be an ABX painter- except that his subject is his beloved homeland - not his own troubled mind.

I wish he had a gallery in Chicago.

Omar Velazquez (b. 1984) Caguama, 2020

Signage tells us that this depicts the artist’s encounter with a sea turtle while canoeing in the mangroves near Salinas, Puerto Rico. Possibly he encountered a duck as well, and had fruit and musical instruments on board.

 

It's pleasant and lighthearted, but I'm sure I don't enjoy it as much as the artist did remembering his experience.  I have no interest in seeing it again.

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Allegedly, this exhibit "examines the artistic genealogies and social justice movements that connect Puerto Rico with Chicago" 

 But what's really interesting were the above paintings on display.  They demonstrate a quite fruitful connection between Puerto Rico and the  School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Two of the above artists are currently faculty members ( Alvarez and Lerma), while the rest all studied there.  They have brought so much beauty and joy to a regional art scene that has mostly been interested in other things.

And though it’s anathema to a Modernist sensitivity, most of their work is saturated with nostalgia. If squeezed, the tears could fill buckets.  That’s probably why the curator chose to emphasize something more fashionable like "Activism".

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As Lori Waxman wrote for Hyperallergic:

The real stars of entre horizontes are big, lush paintings invoking no particular politics but using a variety of techniques borrowed from printmaking: Ángel Otero’s and Arnaldo Roche Rabell’s messy kitchen tables, with collaged fabrics and impressed textures; José Lerma’s breathtakingly confident profile of a woman, brushed in inch-thick acrylics with a commercial broom; Nora Maité Nieves’s “Magnetic Field” — two pairs of iridescent geometric patterned canvases.

So she mostly agrees with me — except that I found Nieves’  grid-obsessed  "Magnetic Field" too boring to mention.  She must have studied with a conceptualist like Michelle Grabner while at SAIC.  By the way, some of the other work she shows online is quite different.

Rebecca Morris at Museum of Contemporary Art

A review of  Rebecca Morris 2001 - 2022 , Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

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I’ve never been able to connect to the Rebecca Morris paintings periodically shown at her local gallery, Corbett Vs. Dempsey.  They felt like cold,  impersonal  experiments in pattern.  A scientist in the laboratory - not an artist in the studio.

But this twenty year retrospective has pulled in pieces that feel different.

Jam packed with tension and excitement. Feels like it started in the center and then struggled to puzzle out the corners.  Morris calls those curved knife-like shapes "lobster claws" - and they do feel formidable.

This speckled piece is more  lighthearted - but it still feels like a person trying to share what is essential and important about their life:  a carefree kind of beauty.

This one does feel experimental - the challenge being to arrange splotches whose soft-edge patterns are always unexpected.  So much anarchy- so much goofiness — highlighted by the shiny gold foil background.  Possibly inspired by the fantasies in Persian miniature painting - or maybe her mother’s clothes closet.

A similar project set against silver foil.

Reminds of the very best quilts - where ordinary fabric is transformed into something too wacky to be from planet earth.  Some women like to over-dress this way -  with deep red nail polish and turquoise cat-eye sunglasses from the 1950’s.  Masculine anarchy tends towards violence - but the feminine moves towards whimsey - and that’s the only kind we need.

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Alan Pocaro wrote a fine review of this show for New City - one of the best I’ve ever read there. He concluded that:

At first “the shock of the new” will hold our attention rapt, convincing us that there is something significant at hand, because visually there is. But late abstraction’s lifeblood is also its fatal flaw. The new colors, shapes, configurations and techniques upon which it depends inevitably become old, tired and predictable. Eventually we come face to face with peculiar-looking paintings that are about an artist making paintings that look peculiar. We can still enjoy them, but eventually we will have to admit: there’s not much to it.

 ...and, thankfully he provided celebrated examples of the opposite: "Point of Tranquility" by Morris Lewis (1959-60) "is bold and beautiful and reaches toward the sublime even as it fails to grasp it"

and "Excavation" by Willem de Kooning (1950).  "one of the greatest paintings in the history of the Western canon"

Absent any recognizable subject matter, abstract painting has always struggled to prove any value other than decorative.   Kandinsky, one of it’s earliest practitioners and promoters, introduced the notion of spirituality.  So a painting could be spiritual even if it was not representing something or someone holy.  Kant’s  notion of the sublime was later added to accommodate those more secular.  And  I suppose we should accept that ‘Excavation" is great just because it has been widely proclaimed as such. (It’s never done much for me)

What I want from an abstract painting is certainly decorative.  I want it to appeal to my eye again and again and again.  But that appeal is something apart from what might be provided by a fresh bouquet of flowers.  It’s the life loving spirit of the artist I want to see - fully realized as a singular form that I can experience.  Admittedly that may be far less than the spirits of saints or divinities that were presented by artists of the past.  And it may be less than some important innovation in concept or technique. But heretic that I am ——- I doubt it.

When Rebecca Morris painted pieces that felt clinical, I had no use for her work.   But when I feel her yearning, living spirit - I am thrilled by her company.

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This seems like a good place to park this quote from Kandinsky about non-objective painting:

A terrifying abyss of all kinds of questions, a wealth of responsibilities stretched before me. And most important of all: what is to replace the missing object? The danger of ornament revealed itself clearly to me; the dead semblance of stylized forms I found merely repugnant. . . . It took a very long time before I arrived at the correct answer to the question: What is to replace the object? I sometimes look back at the past and despair at how long this solution took me. ... Kandinsky, Reminisences, 1915

Nicole Eisenman at MCA Chicago

 A review of Nicole Eisenman : What Happened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago—————————————————————————————————————

Another Green World,  128 x 106, 2015

I don’t enjoy looking at these paintings.  In the tradition of social realist murals,  their message  is delivered at the expense of aesthetics.  Figures often suffer monstrous distortion,  pictorial space is collapsed onto the surface, and color is crudely chopped up as if to make it printable.  You can sense a vigor of  design in the small scale of the jpeg shown above.  It reminds me of the tumultuous battle scenes in Mughal miniatures.   And the celebration of affection and community is truly endearing.  But at room size it’s oppressive.   I’d probably feel the same way about "The Rake’s Progress" by William Hogarth if it were ten feet long instead of two.  

Triumph of Poverty, 2009,   67 x 83"

Eisenman makes clever, gently satirical cartoons.  Gladys Nilsson works a similar territory for us Midwesterners. It’s just that cash value is proportional to size in the contemporary artworld - so she makes them way too big.  Viewers of contemporary art are used to work that makes them feel disoriented and uncomfortable.  I try to avoid it.

Coping, 2008, 65 x 82

This nightmarish scene is somewhat intriguing on my iPad, but oppressive at seven feet across.

Seder,  39 x 48, 2009

This piece is just about the right size - so I can imagine myself reading the Haggadah to an assembled family of gentle folk and misfits, expressively portrayed by the artist.  It makes a fine contrast with Norman Rockwell’s Thanksgiving dinner as attended by idealized stock characters.  But still — a great painting?  No. There is nothing visual here to savor.  It’s all about rambunctious disruption. Everyone feels out of place.  With each viewing it becomes more stale and tiresome. Like the Sunday comics, it’s disposable.

And that’s what separates Eisenman from Brueghel (whom she quoted in "The Triumph of Poverty".).  Pieter  Brueghel the Elder’s paintings were great as both cartoon and painting  - and that hardly ever happens in blue-chip contemporary art.  (Kerry Marshall being a notable exception)

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So I’m not going to assert, as Sebastian Smee recently did in the Washington Post, that  "Nicole Eisenman is one of the best American painters working right now."  Aesthetics still matter - at least to me. Everything else is just subject matter- maybe you identify with it - maybe you don’t.

Smee does, however, make some sharp observations about how Eisenman’s painting has changed over the decades shown in this retrospective. 

And we may note some ambivalence in his concluding paragraphs:

Art, at its best, starts from a premise of aliveness. Aliveness (in the forms of humor, sensuality, richness of response) is attached at the hip to awareness. Awareness (the human brain and body liberated from sentimentality, propaganda and all other forms of denial) involves registering the full extent of the debacle. But acknowledging the debacle, in turn, plunges us into depression — the very opposite of aliveness.
 

Awareness also involves registering the full extent of the miracle - before which we must believe the debacle is just a bump on the road. For those who love the awareness of miracle in form -  Eisenman’s paintings are indeed depressing —- the larger they are, the more so. 

Something like this dynamic inheres in Eisenman’s work. Her paintings and brilliant sculptural ensembles are atotally alive — sometimes almost maniacally so. But they’re also continually collapsing into a stunned stasis. When they emerge again, it’s into states of bafflement as the artist tentatively gropes after community, which she tenderly, gratefully celebrates.

Yes - stunned stasis is what I’m feeling here - and it’s repulsive - however tenderly community has been embraced.  A serious adult public space - like an art museum - should not have the aesthetics of a feel-good daycare center.

BTW - Smee’s essay was quite impressive. If he didn’t pay proper respect to the judgment of the marketplace, he wouldn’t get published.  But if he didn’t subtly undercut it, he wouldn’t be an art critic.

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Nor am I as comforted by these paintings as Annettte Lepique was in New City when she concluded 

Abolitionists in the Park, 2020-2022, 10’8" x 8’9"

There’s something moving about this moment.("Abolitionists in the Park") There’s recognition of not just one of those now-ubiquitous blue masks, but also the quiet trust that the sleeper gives to the people around her. There’s the knowledge that the exhaustion you may have felt and feel in the face of the world’s chaos is shared. There’s reassurance that you too are part of this world, that isolation is not the norm; that someone, somewhere shares language in common with your heart.

Unlike those "abolitionists  in the park", I had no interest in defunding a police department in the aftermath of the George Floyd homicide.  Nor would I conflate them with the indispensable anti-slavery abolitionists of the early 19th century.

So I am not reassured that "someone, somewhere shares language in common with my heart". This is actually a rather small, if vocal, minority of Americans.  This, like so much social justice art, is preaching to the choir.

 When you ask yourself what did you see, what did you do, what all happened? Know this: everything. Everything happened. You just have to look to truly see it all.

These are fit words to end an essay about a show called "What happened?" -  but it’s also a bit of nonsense.  Many things did indeed happen — but none of us can ever truly see it all.  This painting presents only one point of view.