Ellsworth Snyder was a remarkable pianist who, like the better-known David Tudor, specialized in contemporary music. A composer to whom he was close was John Cage, so while the fascinating show at Rosenthal Fine Art is of greatest interest for paintings and collages by Snyder, it also presents works by Cage, including his earliest in a pictorial medium.
Snyder, who wrote the first dissertation on Cage’s music and premiered several of his piano pieces, was encouraged to draw by Cage and clearly inherited his Zen-like simplicity. The works on view are extremely spare in form and color though much more capricious than the Minimal Art created concurrently in the 1960s and 1970s.
Difficult, highly structured music often can sound improvised. Conversely, improvisations can appear to result from tighter control than, in fact, guided them. Snyder’s pictorial works grew from Cage’s encouragement to “create a line, a simple line.” They are, then, the sparest of improvisations. But they achieve sophistication intuitively, without any of the naivete that often marred Cage’s own pictorial essays.
I like especially smaller works in which geometric or pictographic forms are set on a field of black. These pieces have gravity as well as bounce. The show includes works early and late by Snyder and Cage, as well as plenty of documentation to illuminate both their musical and pictorial efforts. A lovely surprise.
At 3 E. Huron St. 312-475-0700.
“Visions of Concern,” at the David Weinberg Collection, is part of this year’s Chicago Humanities Festival on the theme of concern for the environment. Pieces by Tara Donovan, Maya Lin, David Opdyke and Margaret Wertheim carry the theme into installations and constructions, in such once-unusual materials as Mylar, yarn and recycled cardboard.
Donovan’s groups of reflective Mylar spheres and Opdyke’s “Archipelago,” apparently carved from Styrofoam, are the largest and most theatrical pieces, though the former’s abstract qualities withholds it from the easy associations of sci-fi that diminish the latter.
Each give themselves at once, but the movement of air that causes in Donovan’s floor pieces a perpetual tremor, emphasizing their fragility, holds the viewer — prompting thought apart from Opdyke’s spectacle.
Lin’s “landscapes” created from atlases, FedEx boxes, milk cartons and the sleeves of tea bags succeed in creating silk purses from sows’ ears on an agreeably small scale that conveys something monumental.
Many viewers may, however, find the effort self-consciously precious, just as some will doubtless see Wertheim’s fiber pieces as simply decorative evocations of undersea life that softly, fuzzily recall some of Dale Chiuhuly’s glass sculptures.
As one of the first attempts to bring art exhibitions under the umbrella of the Festival, the show is only mildly provocative but nonetheless welcome.
At 300 W. Superior St. 312-529-5090.
Judith Geichman’s abstract paintings at the Alfedena Gallery follow such artists as Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler in creating lyrical effects with layer upon layer of stains in generally pale colors. The show’s catalog essay immediately compares the work to early abstract canvases by Wassily Kandinsky, though that is wishful thinking, as Geichman is nowhere as forceful — and where she apparently tries to be, the effort strains a voice modest in range and light in volume.
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Her canvases are, however, large and when put together, larger. This may seem necessary to the ambition of finding pictorial equivalents for some of the forces of nature. But then you think of the atmospheric mastery achieved by J.M.W. Turner in often a smaller compass, and several of the canvases on view do not feel concentrated enough, whereas several of the works on paper are seen to achieve density at the expense of clarity.
Some pieces come out of a 2005 residency in Iceland. These achieve a strong pictorial effect almost entirely through a palette limited to ice blues, white, black and gray. The 2006 “Icelandic Rush” is the most successful of these paintings, evoking the tumult of landscape through light and air, without actually suggesting more palpable elements such as the rocks and water alluded to elsewhere.
Here less is decidedly more, as it only sporadically is in a group of looping coppery forms of a series on paper.
At 434 W. Ontario St. 312-944-4340.
Jose Cobo’s new sculpture at the Maya Polsky Gallery looks light years away from a piece done in 1994 that also is in the show. All are figurative, but the earlier piece takes off from paintings by Francis Bacon and is expressionistic whereas the recent ones give the sense of being free from artifice and, despite eccentric placement, more rooted in the “real” world. All the pieces, reliefs and freestanding pieces alike, have as their subject a small boy with a cellular phone. The child is dressed in contemporary clothing: baggy jeans and jacket. Different pieces have him holding the phone open or closed, though the attitude of wonder is the same, conveying a primitive sense of amazement.
The all-white freestanding pieces are a little more than three feet in height, suggesting the figure has been cast George Segal-like, from life. But that is not the case. Cobo has worked his polyester resin to achieve a degree of realism higher than in earlier sculptures shown at the gallery. Then he undercuts it by having all the figures look alike, as if to say he has worked less toward the singularity of a portrait than the reproducible design of a robot or clone.
The placement of the figures on ceiling, floors and walls (and equivalents in the reliefs) cast further doubt on the boys, who in one reading may be disquietingly, successfully seen as machines discovering machines.
At 215 W. Superior St. 312-440-0055.
Ellsworth Snyder and John Cage at Rosenthal Fine Art through Nov. 9
“Visions of Concern” at the David Weinberg Collection through Dec. 29
Judith Geichman at the Alfedena Gallery through Nov. 10
Jose Cobo at the Maya Polsky Gallery though Dec. 31
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