Angel Otero is a painter in his early 20s who showed in the “New Insight” group exhibition at Artropolis and is having a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Workshop. He creates abstractions in which the drawing is as important as the painting, but he also wants them to impart some of the character of a topsy-turvy shantytown recalled from childhood in Puerto Rico.
That desire I learned from a written statement. Now I see it, and you probably will too. But upon first encounter Otero’s playing with his supports — dyeing and bleaching the canvas, irregularly shaping or adding to it — suggests he is less interested in a social vision than in the materials and forms of pure abstraction, and is having a ball.
The anything-goes approach leads, of course, to a rawness that at times looks as if it’s about to spin out of control. And I occasionally wondered how much of the mark making in the densest pictures really is essential, necessary. But in the end Otero’s exuberance won out. Here is a young artist who gives the sense that he is throwing himself unreservedly into developing a personal language. If the effort comes close to visual logorrhea — and in places it does — Otero nonetheless draws back from the brink far enough to make him a painter to watch.
At 542 W. Grant Pl. 773-472-4004.
Jennifer Bartlett’s nine paintings at the Richard Gray Gallery are diptychs of the buildings, sky and earth at Amagansett, Long Island, where she has a home close to the beach. Such motifs derive, however, as much from photographs as unmediated observation, though if at all we feel the photographic influence only in abrupt shifts of viewpoint from one canvas to another and some extreme cropping.
More prominent is a deceptive relationship to weaving. When seen from a distance, some of the paintings look as if they could be tapestries, as their various representations look woven. This, in fact, is an illusion, but only when it comes to materials, for the images are woven, from skeins of paint applied by several brushes bound together and used by the artist at once.
Bartlett’s spare, unpopulated scenes, then, emerge from layer upon layer of hatching that create a counterbalancing luxuriousness, as if the surface were a textile. Out of the tension between muted color, spareness of incident and plushness of layered, crisscrossing line comes the works’ interest. But is it enough even in large size? That depends on the individual piece. Some are just empty of forms. Others are vacant. And there is a difference. (To view exhibition images, visit www.richardgraygallery.com.)
At 875 N. Michigan Ave., Ste. 2503. 312-642-8877.
In the 1970s, during the heyday of the kind of Chicago painting known as Imagism, the works of Evelyn Statsinger occupied a somewhat rarefied branch. Nowadays some call what she and a few others did Abstract Imagism, and as applied to Statsinger the term is fair enough. It certainly fits the 1970s paintings shown at the Valerie Carberry Gallery.
Simply put, the works imbue non-objective structures with some of the mystery of surreal landscapes and still lifes. They do this through geometric as well as seemingly organic forms that usually are suffused with light. Color generally is pale and lovingly applied. Deeper colors, with their own glow, assert but never shout. The meticulousness of paint application creates secondary patterns that delicately enliven the canvas surface, whereas most Imagist paintings eschew delicacy and are predominantly flat.
Several of the nine pieces on view are ravishing and on the same plane as abstract paintings by Miyoko Ito, an artist connected socially to the Imagists but whose work lacked their fantasy. Interestingly, both at times employed the “wiggly line” that became an agent of raunch in other hands. But with Statsinger repeated use became ever more refined, approaching the optically poetic. (To view exhibition images, visit www.valeriecarberry.com.)
At 875 N. Michigan Ave., Ste. 2510. 312-397-9990.
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Part of why we look at art is to discover something universal that applies to ourselves, and maybe even is something we didn’t know. Upon seeing that, we think the work good. But if a spark doesn’t jump from the general to the personal, no amount of description can disguise the absence of enlivening current, so it’s probably better just to admit it.
The art of Tony Fitzpatrick falls for me in that category. As a native Chicagoan from a background similar to that of the artist, I once thought I might find some point of congruence, particularly in collage drawings of the sort Fitzpatrick now shows at the Chicago Cultural Center. Yet after decades I have not found it. The work gives me little to identify with beyond nostalgia, the easy longing for the past that’s better for all of us to resist.
Formally, I find the pieces on view overloaded and monotonous. I see their texts as having a similar relationship to poetry as the writings of longshoreman Eric Hoffer had to philosophy. There seems to me a school-of-hard-knocks stance that occasionally falls away to reveal another unsatisfying cliche: the soft-hearted tough guy. Collectors described on a text panel as “stellar” are rewarded, clearly not minding the pictorial hard-sell.
At 78 E. Washington St. 312-744-6630.
EXHIBITIONS
Angel Otero at Contemporary Art Workshop through May 13
Jennifer Bartlett at Richard Gray Gallery through June 7
Evelyn Statsinger at Valerie Carberry Gallery through June 21
Tony Fitzpatrick at Chicago Cultural Center through June 29
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