Tampa painter John Gurbacs has a vision. It stems from an insight he experienced as a student of world religions — Eastern faiths, in particular — as well as fine art, first at FSU, then as a graduate student at USF in the '70s.
The universe, as he sees it, is made of patterns repeating themselves at different scales: the microscopic, the human and the celestial. In paintings at HCC Ybor, he combines elements from all three in dense tableaus.
Each one tells a story of similarity and difference, richly suggestive of perception as an interpretive act rather than a simple encounter with the real world. In one canvas, a pair of fighter jets cruises over a landscape of volcanoes or action-flick-worthy explosions, but the bloody, pockmarked surface turns out to be a microscopic view of sucrose granules. Things that swim — dolphins, human figures, DNA and sperm — are grouped into another image; whether their affinity is real or metaphorical is up for grabs. Throughout, deep, saturated colors lend an extra layer of ambiguity, like a tangerine-orange embryo that doubles as a giant sun.
Fractals, those intricate mathematical patterns that look the same at minute or expansive scales, serve as a visual point of departure for some of the canvases. In the center of each image, he places a fractal snowflake pattern to create a Magritte-like window into another universe of texture and substance. Microscopic views of crystals or a cloud-streaked sky contrast with palm fronds or peeling paint from a building wall or dumpster — surfaces Gurbacs sees when he's out and about in his Sulphur Springs neighborhood. Without context, the realistically painted textures and spaces become abstract and indeterminate.
For someone fascinated with dimension in terms of the images he chooses to depict, it's surprising that the scale of Gurbacs' work is the main thing that's not working well. From a picture of his dense, dynamic compositions — on the exhibit postcard for instance — you'd expect them to be 10 feet tall. At 24 by 36 inches, in most cases, the wow factor is diminished. Gurbacs argues that working smaller lets him create more of his imaginative tableaus, and since one of the pleasures of the exhibit is strolling through nearly 30 of his storytelling images, I'll buy that to some extent.
He says he plans to increase the size of his pieces; as a commercial painter, he has no shortage of experience working large, having created murals at Bobby Hicks Park in Tampa, the Pier Aquarium in St. Pete (this one brand new, just days from being complete) and on the restoration of Tampa Theatre. Until then, there's something to look forward to.
While HCC Ybor moves and expands its gallery space, Gurbacs' paintings are on display in the hallways of the first and second floors of the adjacent fine arts building.
Just a few blocks away at Brad Cooper Gallery, works by a completely different sort of collage master are on view. John Caputo, a USF grad and former UT professor, now lives in upstate New York, where he teaches and curates an art gallery at Siena College. Trained in printmaking and photography as well as painting, he combines elements of all three in his mixed-media works.
Caputo uses transfer techniques to bring bits and pieces of printed images from a wide variety of sources onto the canvas. Religious icons mingle with newspaper photos and matinee idol faces — even a strip of frames from Matt Groening's Life in Hell comic. Childlike pencil drawings and swaths of paint in a playful, abstract expressionist style suggestive of finger painting add additional layers. The result is so intricate and densely textured that some elements don't emerge until you've been peering at the canvas for minutes.
The paintings read as vibrantly colored archeological finds — part pop cultural visual history, part journey into childhood psychology. There's an element of purposeful naiveté with which Caputo scrambles images, ordinarily laden with social, political or religious meaning, here set free in service of sheer joy and narrative self-expression. That pleasure in the sign for the sign's sake recalls the art of Robert Rauschenberg, whose work at USF's Graphicstudio may have been an influence on Caputo.
The exhibit is the first following an announcement by gallery owner Brad Cooper and his wife Elizabeth that they plan to sell their Seventh Avenue building and move to Greece. Though they'd love to be headed into Mediterranean waters as early as next month, they say the process could easily take a year, so there is no plan to discontinue exhibits soon.
When they do relocate, the Coopers are looking forward to a decompressed European lifestyle, less saturated with media culture and more suited to enjoying each day. They don't plan to sever all connections with the area; they'll keep the gallery's website (www.bradcoopergallery.com) going and possibly even curate some online-only exhibits.
Once established, they hope to offer cultural workshops and lure guests from Tampa to Greece. Brad Cooper also hopes to devote time to his own painting; Elizabeth Cooper is a jewelry maker whose work is on display at the gallery.
It's a sad day for Tampa when one of the enduring cornerstones of the local arts community decides to call it quits. After winning Best of Show at Gasparilla Festival of the Arts in 1987, Brad Cooper used the prize money to help purchase the Ybor building and open the gallery.
A pioneer in the area, Cooper not only held exhibits but staged events until bars colonized the area. When that occurred, his business dropped 75 percent, and noise from the bars made the building unsuitable as a living space, adding the additional expense of another mortgage, Cooper said. Since then, he said, keeping the gallery going has become an increasingly difficult proposition.
This article appears in Oct 11-17, 2006.