Bill Lee, “Isolation #19 ‘Covid 19’”

There’s only one thing more enjoyable for an arts writer than discovering a fresh young artist (usually just escaped from one or another splendid college program and shyly showing off inventions they’ve been misled to expect no one will be thrilled by)—that even greater, if only because less common, pleasure is to further explore the reliable revelations of a familiar favorite, a survivor of a life focused on sensitivity in a brutal world, along with the ups and downs of its marketplace. This month, in Fragments and Formulations at Alpine Art on South Temple, we are thrice-blessed by a collaborative showing of three such veterans: Bill Lee, Frank McEntire, and Darryl Erdmann.

All three of these originals learned early the value of art that recycles the visual world from which it emerges, and not just through aesthetic filters, but literally in the form of collage. In turn, each teaches a master class in how formal design relates to and emerges from vernacular sources. Bill Lee intersperses thickly-layered comments on the everyday quarantine that flesh is heir to, like “Isolation #56” and “AK Finally Found,” with collages closer to the original meaning of the term, like “Isolation #19 ‘Covid 19’,” which combines found calligraphy and ambiguous anatomical and biological illustrations to suggest that our recent, lonely challenges had a longer and deeper grasp on us than we care to admit.

Bill Lee, “DKY 910”

Two of the fundamental elements in the exhibition statement, “deconstruction and reassembly,” clearly refer to the mental process of art making in the mind as well as to the physical labor of the artists’ hands. The most transparent examples are from Frank McEntire, whose works here come from the more refined side of his assemblage technique. In place of antique industrial and farm implements that locate today’s only-too-familiar struggle between agriculture and hydraulics on the scale of entire continental epochs, here he shows how more subtle, if still ingeniously clever reconsideration of domestic knickknacks and bibelots can replace volumes of tedious social criticism. Whether it’s “The Rider, the Elephant, and the Path,” with its western everyman naively following the Hindu flight from Illusion, or “Resource,” wherein sheer brawn turns its attention to the resources of grace, these illuminating meditations, which fit neatly on a desk or shelf, remind us that even more than literary texts, appearances benefit from close reading.

Frank McEntire, “Divine Flautist with Bansuri”

 

Darryl Erdmann is an artist who has learned a simple message from life that he seeks to impart to his audience—one so readily accessible that he’s had to reinvent his art repeatedly in an effort to convey it to his many overly-sophisticated listeners, among whom a principal example is this writer. My three previous encounters with him, all still available on 15 Bytes’ archive, focused on efforts to explain why his technique saw such radical changes with each exhibition. It came as quite the surprise to realize that he’s been offering the same explanation all along.

At one point, he seemed to be making reference in new works to older works, as though taking comments made in one context and repeating them in another to show how transient meaning can be. Then he collaged in photographs, paraphrasing and updating the moment when Picasso and Braque collaged commercial labels onto paintings of the things from which they’d peeled those labels. But it now appears likely that what he was actually doing was trying different kinds of picture-making in an effort to make a point not really about pictures, but about everything, and not just visible things, though as a painter that’s his rational starting place.

“I don’t like pictures,” he says now. How can an artist not like pictures? Let’s consider for a moment the plight of the unfortunate one who sets out to copy an appearance. Immediately, he enters into conversation with the subject, but also with the viewer. It’s these conversations that matter to Erdman, and he’s not alone in this. Architects have often spoken of dialogues and conversations between buildings, a verbal metaphor that in their case has struggled less for acceptance.

No doubt art critics and dealers bear some of the blame, with their (our) obsessing on the single subject so revealingly captured with the eloquent brush. How long did it take for Western Civilization (which the Dalai Lama once said sounded like “a good idea”) to stop obsessing on Mona Lisa’s smile and notice Leonardo’s own obsession: the riverine landscape behind her?

So in what may be a breakthrough, or might be just another step along the way, Erdmann has set aside as many of the pictorial attributes as he can—the weightless, two-dimensional canvas and frame, the distracting subject matter—and in their place wrapped his virtuoso painting around what is essentially a box, one deep enough to call attention to its sides as well as its front. He’s kept the essence of the collage that all three of these artists depend on in one form or another, keeping it in the way his foregrounded elements visibly ride on top of their backgrounds, as if he, too, has realized that to be “seamless” is not the virtue contemporary criticism thinks it is. In any event, what Darryl Erdmann wants is for viewers of “Pushover” or “Unique Timbre” to focus on the conversations they present—and not “represent.” Note how the yellow figure in “Unique Timbre” bends well before it reaches the edge of the box. Take literally the title “Mirage #9.”

Here and throughout the Alpine Art, an entirely new adventure for the eye and mind has begun.

Darryl Erdmann,”Mirage #9″

Fragments & Formations, Alpine Art, Salt Lake City, through April 11.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.