The most beguiling work in the show by Harold Haydon at the Corbett vs. Dempsey Gallery reproduces part of a landscape seen from a train window. By 1934, the year the canvas was completed, the viewpoint would not have been unusual. But the pink-red arch that isolates the landscape somewhat like the iris effect in silent movies is singular, for Haydon painted everything he saw — the bridge of his nose, arch of the eye socket, and eyebrow in addition to the train window and landscape.
That is, he painted everything before his eye focused and concentration minimized aspects of the scene so effectively that they were edited out. But Haydon’s lifelong interest was what the eye sees before too many brain functions prioritize data. So he painted what the human eye would see were it allowed to maintain pure voraciousness, taking in everything with the indiscrimination of a camera.
Most important for this exhibition, a pair of eyes would see double images out of register. Forget how the mind adjusts for this. Haydon wanted to reproduce facts of seeing, such as sunspots or afterimages, and binocular vision became for him an obsession. That it was not for any other artist baffled him. Presumably he thought its time would come. But here we are, 13 years after his death, and the moment hasn’t happened. All those pictures, arresting and original, by a beloved local art critic remain the kind of fascinating curiosities that larger art cities think happen only in Chicago.
At 1120 N. Ashland Ave., 773-278-1664.
In the last several years a number of painters have attempted to develop a language that teems with pictorial incident and thrives on discord. Representation, abstraction, decoration, heavy impasto, dry pigment, flat pattern, collage, photo transfer, cartoons, Old Master quotations, meticulousness, abandon — all come together in a tumble that has little apparent justification yet seems appropriate to our conservative, synthesizing times.
Jackie Tileston’s paintings at Zg Gallery are paintings of this sort. But the artist provides justification. Having been born in the Philippines and lived in Singapore, Paris and London before coming to the United States, she seeks to bring together something of the history and traditions of art in all those places, as, in a very real sense, they are already in herself.
The paintings are, then, mental landscapes in which Rudyard Kipling is proved wrong, for the East and West do meet, through digital transfers of paintings and wallpapers as well as Tileston’s own photographs and painted borrowings. No single element or technique is more important than any other, as combination is here the thing, and it appears to have been carried out in the most positive spirit. The works on paper are more restrained and thus lean toward greater formal purity, but if seen after the paintings, you soon miss their tumult. Less is not more here. More is more, even when it spills over into being too much.
At 300 W. Superior St., 312-654-9900.
Gordon Powell’s abstract constructions at Perimeter Gallery are all of wood, hugging the wall like paintings or occasionally protruding like reliefs. But in effect and number of pieces the link to painting is stronger, as the veteran Chicago artist seems more interested in creating illusions on a flat surface than presenting objects in three dimensions.
There are, for example, several pieces apparently fitted together like puzzles within wide frames or surrounds. However, the spaces between individual components and Powell’s drawn additions are sometimes difficult to tell apart, so we’re not always sure which is the result of construction or of painting. The ambiguity adds a flutter to the otherwise unruffled purity of delicate mark making and pale color.
Occasionally, in some smaller pieces, flatly painted rectangles or line segments will be inserted into seemingly weathered wood. Here the inlays function as miniature Purist abstractions, surprising with such colors as chartreuse, ocher or black. These works are especially deft, though my favorites among the works on view are the ones in which delicate clusters of drawn line on light wood are compressed within extremely dark surrounds, achieving perfect equipoise. They preserve an agitation and a meditative quality at once, neither being stronger than the other or diffused as they tend to be in the artist’s largest pieces.
At 210 W. Superior St., 312-266-9473.
Howard Henry Chen was born of Chinese parents in Vietnam 35 years ago and brought to the United States as an infant. Several of his cousins, however, stayed behind, and in the last several years he reunited with them. His color photographs at the Schneider Gallery are a record of their meetings after three decades of separation, but, as important, a document of their differences, expressed through landscape.
Chen and his cousins each served as tour guides for the other. They took him to amusement parks and museums that came about after he left. He took them to temples and natural landscapes that were there before they were born. So, in a sense, all approached their native country as tourists, with the pictures showing — and telling, as Chen writes long, diaristic captions — in deadpan fashion some of their reactions, from bewilderment to boredom.
Chen worked with a view camera, making long exposures that achieve great detail and ghostly traces of people passing through the pictures. Both add to a sense, already given by the manufactured nature of the sites, of things being a bit off, heightened by kitsch and other peculiarities of contemporary middle-class culture. A recurring triptych format refers to traditional Vietnamese lacquer painting even as the subjects indicate a brave new world.
At 230 W. Superior St., 312-988-4033.
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Harold Haydon through Oct. 20 at Corbett vs. Dempsey Gallery
Jackie Tileston through Oct. 13 at Zg Gallery
Gordon Powell through Oct. 16 at Perimeter Gallery
Howard Henry Chen through Oct. 20 at Schneider Gallery
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