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player ready...In his latest show at the Roy Boyd Gallery, the collages of John Reuter-Pacyna have shifted from pastel sweetness to a more earthy palette of beiges, browns, blacks, blues and an occasional spark of red or orange that rivets the eye.
The found papers he uses have also grown a bit larger, but continue to be placed in very linear arrangements that almost look like elegantly plowed Midwestern landscapes photographed from high in the air.
The overall effect, particularly when the 25 mixed-media works are viewed en masse, remains the same as in the artist’s other shows, yet this time is more convincing. These are serene, calming works whose individual parts may have been rough-textured and humble in their original state — maps, surveys from old buildings, wrapping papers for old bricks — but they no longer exude that gritty sense when they are combined.
He has deliberately chosen not to alter any of them with paint or pencil, and takes considerable effort to preserve them in stacks of the same colors until he’s ready to “play chess with them,” he explains. Then, he carefully combines them for the right geometric configuration that appears so amazingly natural and simple.
Reuter-Pacyna’s appreciation of Piet Mondrian and the de Stijl movement and even of the architecture of Mies van der Rohe is undeniable, though the texture of this German-born artist’s found objects ironically make his works look less hard-edged and severe.
“I’ve always looked to create a universal simplicity by having them seem to float off the surface as a relic that I revere,” he says. “I strive toward an almost religious point of view. The ordering of these elements transforms society’s castoffs into spiritual windows of contemplation,” he says.
Also refreshing is that Reuter-Pacyna had no other agenda beside creating good art. “They are not political. They represent a culmination of the art I’ve been making for 38 years,” he explains.
While the individual collages are sold separately, gallery owner Roy Boyd has arranged them in their spare pale wood frames in small groupings that become irresistible because of the rhythm of the patterns and colors that is revealed as a viewer’s eyes move among the works.
The show continues until Tuesday at 739 N.Wells St.
The dozen prints that Jeanine Coupe Ryding creates explore variations on the human head through large, forceful shapes that sometimes have an intact neck and shoulders intact but almost never have facial features (except for one black-and-white print). To these she adds small hatchings across the entire surface, and she works in sensuous, unrealistic colors.
The artist’s choice of subject matter is rooted in the fact that the head is the simplest and most recognizable part of the body. Yet, these works, like Reuter-Pacyna’s, are far from simple. A close examination of the surface reveals how the lines, which dance about in innumerable directions like pencil shavings let loose, are built up from multiple layers. The palette consists of rich beiges, ochers, umbers, blues and greens.
Her choices develop as she works; she doesn’t hold herself to some preconceived plan. But her technique has consequences, she says.
“This means that I must be prepared to be surprised, sometimes pleased and even fail since there is no definite plan to carry me forward in this exploration. The meaning is in the doing or the making of the print and the discoveries I make in the process.”
The variations in her oval heads and the elegance with which she gives them a sense of three-dimensionality suggest years of figure and portrait studies as well as a background in sculpture and a respect for Constantin Brancusi’s sophisticated simplicity.
Coupe Ryding received a master of fine arts degree in sculpture and printmaking while studying in Berlin and has been on the printmaking faculty at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1989. The titles such as “Very Smart Head,” “Torment” and “Friend” seem irrelevant and contrived and might have been better left off, as in one work named “Untitled.” But that is a small point to quibble over in an otherwise strong exhibition.
“Heads” continues through Saturday at Anchor Graphics, 119 W. Hubbard St.