 |
| SANDRA GOTTLIEB |
Idiosyncrasy is the
hallmark of the creative individual, who not only refuses to be limited by
critical bias or historical convention, but remains devoted to the idea that
drove them in the first place, no matter where it first originated. One can see
in the artists of Free Form Five, curated
by D. Dominick Lombardi, a dedication to the rigor of their craft. One is easily
drawn toward their individual aesthetic world views, which in a group format, proves a strong impulse
constantly evading easy definition. Each of the artists participating in this
exhibition has a long established practice of maintaining a level of order that
evolves their vision and simultaneously critiques a main convention of art. New
histories emerge from their work to qualify and inform future generations.
As a photographer who chooses
to eschew the human as a subject, Sandra
Gottlieb turns instead to nature though not in any decorative or pedestrian
fashion. Her relationship to nature as a photographic medium finds easy access
to wonder via an openness to chance and to the powerful forms that present
themselves in oceanic tides or smoke swirling up from a fire. Her current
series, represented here by a narrative of four images arranged sequentially, presents
her 2016 series “Cloud Studies” which first occurred while the artist was
witnessing a sunset in Rockaway Beach of her native borough of Queens. The
cloud forms swirled up spontaneously, altering her immediate view and
suggesting something darkly beautiful and quite moving that she needed to
document. This singular event precipitated a sequence of new images numbering
into the hundreds. When I say ‘clouds at sunset’ perhaps a multitude of images
flip through your mind, or perhaps one event sticks in your memory. They may
all be wrong. After witnessing Gottlieb’s photographs you will have a different
understanding of sunsets, clouds, and everything in between. What is important
to know about these image is that the event that dictated them took place not
in any recognizable local, but in the same nexus where she took her image of
waves, a spot some few hundred yards off the coast of Rockaway Park, New York,
which is situated on the landmass of Long Island some twenty one miles from
Manhattan, and her view is southerly, meaning that the use of light in the late
part of the day is illuminated from the right, where the sun sets more than
twenty miles to the west. This may produce an eerie scene, in which every
degree of available light becomes as much the subject as the event or element
in question. The range of expression in these photographs can be apollonian or
stygian depending upon how the clouds swirl, some still containing sustained
light from the far-off sunset, while above them darkness descends, creating an
narrative moment of epic proportion.
 |
| SHARON KAGAN |
Sharon Kagan’s paintings possess a
shared power of beauty and ambivalence. They achieve a strong impression
despite a mixed agenda mired as deeply in
the artist’s biases against other métiers as for her own discipline. Her
work reinforces the idea that to be creatively successful one must have an
attitude verging on ideology. Kagan plays with forms and with layers of
perception but she also plays with our expectations, and our tangent comfort in
how esthetic event must please us in an unordered fashion. Starting with generically
organic forms suggested by documenting such materials as bunches of twine in
semi-darkness using a digital camera, Kagan blows the image up and emphasizes
the obscure sections by adding an allover grid and then meticulously
delineating and drawing into the folds of the forms themselves. This creates
images that are quantum in nature, both expansive and reductive depending upon
the visual level at which they are perceived. Either take in a painting that
measures two by ten feet, or swoop down into crevices, or into the moody
background, where modulated and quantified markings inhabit as well as measure
the space in and around her writhing or knot-like forms. One cannot remain
ignorant of the why as well as the how in her paintings, which exist as
evidence of the complexity of a perspective on form, on reality, and on the
power of the creative impulse to manifest in a layered and ontologically
diverse manner a reality that many may easily take for granted.
 |
| BOBBIE MOLINE-KRAMER |
The impulse toward abstraction
and the one toward realistic depiction seem mutually opposed, yet the paintings
of Bobbie Moline-Kramer commingle
these agendas to radical effect. Who in their right mind, when gazing at an
abstract painting, would ever imagine, much less encounter the painting gazing
back at them, perhaps even laughing? This is the sort of event which
Moline-Kramer suggests, not merely a diffusion of painterly effects, but a
visual dialogue toward the supposition of an actual presence. In almost every
other form of creative endeavor considered ‘culture’ there is a degree of
countenance—performers on a stage, despite the vaunted fourth wall, often find
themselves peering into the eyes of the audience’s faces closest to them; in
film we gaze upon the actors, taking them in as representative embodiments of
our own lives. Only in some art, that is to say the great expanse of “abstract
art” that stands for progress in creative vision over the interval of the last
century, are we presented with an absence of necessary countenance. We are
expected to realize and appreciate the boundary and enjoinder represented by
the painted image that does not reflect us except in some obscure fashion. Yet
we are sometimes found wanting. This is where Moline-Kramer steps up.
 |
| REBECA CALDERON PITTMAN |
The difference between
reality and abstraction is like that between wakefulness and dreaming.
Perception defines the first while context defines the latter. The paintings of
Rebeca Calderon Pittman present the
best case for bringing both together. Her works have a draftsmanlike quality
that refuses to connect all the dots in a useful and sensible manner, instead
creating an elliptical reality in which they viewer may either make a range of
subtle connections or choose to allow the ambiguity of the work’s apparent
formlessness to produce visions. Why these objects in this specific
combination? Is their specificity a means of implying the strong presence of
sensible and practical objects rather than transforming them into symbols? Is
the world of the senses so unreliable? Pittman constructs a labyrinthine degree
of encounter in which the viewer must define each step as they match elements
one to another, or build mental bridges between delineated and blank spaces.
 |
| SUSAN SOMMER |
The paintings of Susan Sommer give the outward
appearance of being mere gestural abstraction, yet there is more than meets the
eye. Placed around the picture, almost haphazardly, are a number of color
squares that look like they escaped from a grid in another painting. In truth,
they are a further dimension of phenomena that are encountered in Sommer’s
painterly visualizations of how the natural environment appeals to our senses,
chromatic and sensuous, fleeting and dynamic, intimate and all encompassing. Her
paintings seek to create an effect by which the viewer becomes completely
immersed in a weld of sensation, where intuition leads the intellect against
its will. If there is another artist she could be compared to, it is Corot,
whose paintings of rural life were not only narrative in an elysian fashion, but
explored the matter of nature as it shaped and colored these lives. Somer is
involved in just such an adventure. Her works reveal the hidden color structure
within all things, allowing us to walk in field and forests of our own imagining.
Artists follow the
ideal embodied by the concept of form, but in each case idiosyncrasy takes over
and form achieves something eminently unique. Each of the artists presented in
D. Dominick Lombardi’s curated exhibition “Freeform 5” are adept in their respective
dialogues with form and where it meets not only with the audience perceiving
it, but with their shared epoch. “Freeform 5” is a powerful statement on the
duties of form to achieve and accrue meaning for our time.
Comments