This year, gallery owner Erika Greenberg-Schneider made a difficult decision. She trimmed the number of exhibits at Bleu Acier, her West Tampa gallery, from half a dozen to three or four per year. She opted to show higher-priced, potentially more valuable work — and she hoped her business would survive.
The results are captivating. Metal Leather Resin Wax, Bleu Acier's latest show, presents a focused exhibit of four sculptors who mold, melt, hammer and sew those four materials into their own creations.
Rising New York star Jean Shin gives new life to objects worn with daily use. Among the materials she has reincarnated into organic and architectural forms are battered umbrellas, spent lottery tickets and empty pill bottles. For a recent installation at the Museum of Modern Art, Shin cut up and reassembled the clothing of museum staffers — from janitors to curators — to create a web of fabric that revealed a colorful narrative of social status.
At Bleu Acier, pieces from Shin's "The Hides" series of sculptures emanate talismanic vibes. Fleshy loops of shoe leather are re-sewn into a pair of cloak-like nets. In Shin's hands, the supple, pliable scraps are freed from their man-made confines and reconnect with animal nature. Swatches of color — accents on a pair of ladies' pumps — evoke the mottled pelt of an exotic beast or a tattoo. Each net is temptingly wearable, though its proper place is hanging from a ceiling, casting lacy shadows onto a white wall.
Along with Shin, the work of French artist Hervé Di Rosa constitutes the meat of the exhibit. His chunky polyester resin gremlins celebrate the marriage of bizarre and quotidian à la SpongeBob SquarePants. Shiny green Groug, a stout monster with a toothy grimace, begs to be cuddled like a new puppy. Six-eyed Baby Twins and Polo, whose multiple faces anxiously apprehend the world from all angles, are less adorable, more disturbing.
Di Rosa earned notoriety earlier in his career by championing kitsch as an art form, and eventually founded a museum — the International Museum of Modest Art in Sète, France — to house the knickknacks he acquired during trips around the world. Now a resident of Miami, Di Rosa often paints that city's melting-pot landscape of vibrant billboards and bodega storefronts, where two-dimensional versions of his creatures roam. Schneider, who is also a master printmaker, said she and Di Rosa plan to produce a series of lithographs at Bleu Acier in the future.
At the more subdued end of the spectrum, French sculptor Dominique Labauvie, who is Schneider's husband, hammers rigid metal into balletic poses. His wall-mounted sculptures hint at dancers in motion or Chinese calligraphy. A set of charcoal drawings speaks with the terse vocabulary of cave paintings.
USF MFA graduate Marie Yoho Dorsey applies principles of ikebana to create an immersive installation of wax-dipped silk flowers suspended from the ceiling in a spiral. The weight of wax lends the delicate strands a gravity that keeps them from swaying even as visitors walk around the installation. The effect is an enchanting stillness. Dorsey will show in the Tampa Museum of Art's underCURRENT/overVIEW exhibit this May, so expect to see more of her work in the near future.
Iconic is the word that springs to mind whenever I see a painting by Theo Wujcik. He remains a stalwart member of a generation including Lichtenstein, Rosenquist and Hockney — even pays homage to the latter two with portraits in the exhibition — who created big, sexy paintings celebrating the fruition of visual pop culture in America.
Subsequent generations have edged further away from representation, turning the canvas into an object for exploration of material, texture and chance. But not Wujcik, who continues with masterful ability to let his canvases reflect explicitly on the power of image.
Nor does entering the seventh decade of life appear to have diminished the former USF professor's rock-and-roll spirit. Upon learning that the Ybor building his studio occupies would be put up for sale by its owner, Wujcik decided to open the personal space to the public for one last hurrah on March 25..
Next, over a dozen of his paintings on the theme Global Warming will travel to Orlando for exhibition at Millenia Gallery. The large-scale canvases play literally on the power of the icon, depicting familiar images obscured by a grid of colored pixels, Wujcik's signifier for the chaos surrounding the concept of global warming.
Wujcik shies away from placing blame, but a number of the paintings tag potential contributors to the phenomenon. "Tumultuous Legacy" incorporates a round, abstract shape suggestive of a wheel with a plume of exhaust. "China Connection" plays on the romantic idealization of bright city lights as symbol of progress and modernity. "Global Crown" clearly depicts the thorny crown of Jesus Christ, but the message is ambiguous — is global warming an act of God or a crisis that could wipe out even our most treasured fantasies of immortality?
Elsewhere in his studio, an entirely different series of paintings dubbed "Blind Couture" are loose and soft in comparison. The title alludes to the blind contour method of drawing — a classic student exercise of sketching without looking at the paper — that Wujcik used to create bittersweet images of the larger-than-life allure of fashion culture. The loopy, sometimes scrawling line work turns out to be the perfect medium for portraying the sinewy bodies of androgynous models. Cheekbones and ankles take on skeletal angularity; bead-like nipples jut out from diaphanous fabrics. While the two series of paintings diverge completely in content and method, they share the sense of majestic importance characteristic of Wujcik's work.
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 4, 2006.