Whenever I stand in front of an abstract work of art, I’m reminded of the power of abstraction to communicate experiences that elude description — to generate whole other worlds, unfettered by the limits of the real.
St. Pete artist Daniel Williams started on the path to abstraction early.
“As a kid, I didn’t really read books,” he says. “I read maps.”
Now Williams’s map-based paintings — geometric collages that conjure imaginary, multi-dimensional landscapes — are part of Visible/Invisible, an exhibition at Tempus Projects in Seminole Heights featuring three respected local artists, all of whom have arrived at abstraction in various ways. In addition to Williams, the show spotlights Edgar Sanchez Cumbas, an acclaimed painter whose resume includes a solo exhibition at the former Gulf Coast Museum of Art, and Kurt Piazza, a video and multimedia artist whose work shone last year in an exhibit at HCC Ybor.
Credit for bringing the three artists into juxtaposition goes to Piazza, whose career includes experience as a curator. (He organized Sanchez’s one-man show at GCMA while working at the museum.) Per his curatorial vision, all three image-makers in the show play with the porous division between visible and invisible in their constructions of color, form and space.
Williams, the youngest and most “emerging” of the three, is represented by the least amount of work. An asymmetrical grid of his abstract paintings on chunky wood blocks just hints at a talent ready to materialize in fuller form. Williams says that’s only likely to happen when his band, Guiltmaker, requires less time. (And that might not be any time soon — the band just launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund their latest album.) In the meantime, the blocks — each covered on one side with a dynamic collage of patterned paper and acrylic paint — convey a sense of Williams’s talent for building abstractions that imply space and place without giving it away.
Likewise, Sanchez’s latest paintings expect viewers to perform some labor of looking. Ten recent paintings find him seemingly obsessed with color, situating pure squares of minty green or blazing yellow on wood slabs, atop lower layers of more gestural abstraction — swaths and blobs that remain visible along the edges of the perfect color squares. These intriguing works put serious meat on the exhibition’s bones. At first sight I took them as signs of Sanchez’s engagement with particular formal questions — exploring how color pricks the senses and where and when a painting shuttles between cold, dead object and something more alive.
What I was surprised to learn is that Sanchez’s fascination with color has roots in real-life matters (rather than painting’s inside baseball, though that’s present in the work, too). He regards the color patches as skin tones, an idea that becomes clearer up close, where the painted squares show off sanded surfaces nearly as smooth as flesh. His interest in painting as skin grew after a series of contentious conversations with his Puerto Rican parents about his 3-year-old daughter’s skin tone (i.e., how dark her skin might become and what role her parents should play in managing it). As reminders of his daughter, Sanchez places small, abstracted locks of hair around some of the color squares, most of which playfully avoid conforming to conventional ideas of skin color, inviting the question — does a figure appear in these paintings after all?
Such sophisticated thinking about what painting can be shows why Sanchez is one of our best artists.
Finally there’s Piazza, whom it’s easy to envy for being both a talented maker of work and the thoughtful organizer of the exhibition. Four of his videos run continuously on a loop inside a white room with fabric walls constructed in the center of Tempus Projects. Two of the videos appropriate footage from famously bleak and disturbing films, Rainer Werner Fassbiner’s Veronika Voss (1982) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980); the other two use footage shot in Tampa. In both cases, Piazza treats the initial footage as raw material, radically transforming it through digital manipulation and adding new soundtracks composed from found and altered sound.
The resulting product obscures its origins but makes something else visible — or it leaves tantalizing hints of its past, like the glimpse of a hatchet swinging through the air that cuts through Piazza’s otherwise very abstract Video 237, based on The Shining. The same operation transpires in a quartet of black-and-white inkjet prints based on video stills Piazza shot in Port Tampa’s shipyards, but stripped down and filtered through visual effects to create a post-apocalyptic landscape.
Like everything else in Visible/Invisible, they leave me puzzling over what exactly I’m looking at, but certain I like it.
This article appears in Mar 15-21, 2012.