Cecil McDonald Jr. is a Chicago photographer whose overriding theme is family. In the large color prints at the Catherine Edelman Gallery the family is McDonald’s own, caught in such “snapshot” moments as reading in bed and an argument between father and daughter in a car.
But the images are not snapshots. They are scenes from the everyday remembered and restaged. And, therefore, monumentalized. This gives them a more universal quality, and it’s not at all easy because when domestic sentiment is pushed, it can end up looking sentimental.
Only a couple of the 17 images on view, however, go too far and get a little sticky. They are the ones shot not at McDonald’s home but at a factory that becomes, in effect, a stage with the results being, for my taste, too theatrical. There you feel everyone working with the space rather than simply allowing incidents to arise naturally from it.
I like especially the shot at home of McDonald’s daughters playing their parents’ LPs. Put that alongside them playing in silhouette inside the factory and there’s no comparison. It’s the difference between real warmth and show-biz emotion. (To view images, see edel mangallery.com/mcdonald.htm)
At 300 W. Superior St. 312-266-2350.
The 400th anniversary of the first part of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote occurred three years ago, with little notice in our land of non-readers. But now the Instituto Cervantes of Chicago has mounted a tribute of pastels and lithographs from the Chilean artist Roberto Antonio Sebastian Matta Echaurren that testifies to the adage of better late than never.
Shortly after the artist completed two sets of lithographs (in 1985 and 1990), he forcefully denied he had illustrated the novel, claiming the works were more his “hallucinations about Quixote.” And from the evidence, that seems true enough. As is shown in the exhibition through text and reproductions of drawings, passages from Cervantes triggered graphic outpourings in Matta’s own semi-abstract language. Larger themes of love and war appear in multiple panels familiar from comic books. Quixote was the catalyst, but apart from forms associated with him — horse, lance, idealized woman, sidekick — and the mayhem of many battles, a narrative is impossible to follow.
The important additions here are six never-before-exhibited pastels, from a series of 10 created in 1989. These are large, atmospheric pieces that translate Quixote into Matta’s language most beautifully. Neither hectic nor comic, the best of them convey through form and color a tender gravity that gets right to the heart of the character. Warmly recommended.
At 31 W. Ohio St. 312-335-1996.
Ben Gest’s exhibition at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in 2006 showed him a master of deceptive, constructed photo images that lie somewhere between snapshots and paintings. Now, at the Stephen Daiter Gallery, he embarks on a new series, again largely devoted to single figures, in which the dominant theme is more dramatic because it centers around struggle.
Of course, the “struggles” pictured are often mild, as when one elderly woman walks a dog or another bends to put on stockings. Only once in the show, in fact, is the incident depicted overtly stressful, as one small boy apparently bullies another. The others are devoted to such activities as driving, reaching for a pet or reading to a refractory child. But in each case the anxiety subtly tells.
This happens in part because of how Gest pieces together each picture from many digital grabs, allowing him to minimize this and exaggerate that. The result is that many aspects of each image are slightly “off,” and the sum of these pictorial oddities creates as much tension as the incidents themselves. These photos demand — and repay — sustained viewing.
At 311 W. Superior St. 312-787-3350.
Many artists have seen printmaking simply as a means to disseminate their imagery widely. Chicago artist Vera Berdich (1915-2003) saw it as her primary medium, and the 30-year selection of her art at Printworks shows the strength of that commitment.
She was a great experimenter in aquatint/etchings and later works that make use of photographic techniques. Both are represented in the exhibition drawn from works Berdich bequeathed the Art Institute of Chicago to be sold for the increase of acquisition funds in the area of prints and drawings.
The richest of her complex, layered pieces have tended to mark Berdich as an artist with strong surreal leanings. However, motifs that appear with frequency in her prints — eyes, clocks, moons, statuary, gardens — arose from her own experience rather than the art of European forebears. In that sense, she was like her older contemporary, photographer Clarence John Laughlin, whose surreal images also have the pull of personal nostalgia for an atmosphere that has passed. How much one responds to such atmosphere will vary from viewer to viewer. But the restlessness of Berdich’s experimentation also is a draw, and it is strongly present here. (To view images, see printworkschicago.com).
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At 311 W. Superior St. 312-664-9407.
EXHIBITIONS
Cecil McDonald Jr. at Catherine Edelman Gallery through June 3
Roberto Antonio Sebastian Matta Echaurren at Instituto Cervantes through June 20
Ben Gest at Stephen Daiter Gallery through June 28
Vera Berdich at Printworks through July 5
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