NARKEETA: If paintings are a puzzle, these are the assembled solutions. |
I once asked a gallery director how he decides whether to consider representing an artist, and he confessed to having what he called “the rule of three”: if three different parties independently recommended he check somebody out, that’s when he scheduled a studio visit. One Boston artist has gone that rule one better, simultaneously occupying the Project Space of the Bromfield Gallery and being the subject of a solo show of paintings at the Artists Foundation Gallery as well as the featured artist in the Bernard Toale Gallery’s ongoing Boston Drawing Project and a contributor to the summer group show at Tufts University with two of his signature wall manipulations. Chris Nau (rhymes with “cow”) is riding a surge. His popularity is deserved. This recent work gives a sense of his studied playfulness. He brings an anthropologist’s sensibility — exploratory field work to be sure, but deliberate to the point of mathematical — to his colorful abstract forms. At the center of his paintings and woodblock prints looms a multi-sided, typically striped shape, and within those simple constants of outer edge and inner content begins one of many tensions at work in his frames. The stripes themselves are angular and bold; the shapes they zigzag across have had all their edges pressed into soft contours. Imagine a package with adhesive wrapping that’s been worked over by a rock tumbler or the tide or UPS. Metaphors quickly break down in trying to describe Nau’s imagery, however, since there’s no making sense of how the sharp definition of the patterns coexists with the randomly amorphous forms to which they belong — except that those same words can also be applied to the detritus of train wrecks and car accidents and the aftermath of natural disasters. Integrity and dissolution balance each other. And yet nothing explicitly suggests damage: no edges blacken, nothing appears cut off or incomplete or compromised. After considerable pondering of these images, the nearest I could get to a simile was thinking that this is what space debris must be like: improbable manufactured heaps whose purpose has passed and whose former velocity and direction have been reduced to gravity-free floating.
Floating is indeed another recurrent Nau motif, particularly in the paintings where the background washes of color are not the blue-black of outer space you might expect but instead the subtle tones, sometimes uniform, sometimes graduated, that complement the bright hues of the central figures. Nothing especially new or groundbreaking there, except for the nature of the colors themselves, which enjoy a weird, industrial quality — the sort of hues you might expect on the bathroom walls of a house built in 1958. Again, the effect is disarming. What’s to be made of brick-red stripes interspersed with swaths of police-barricade yellow?
Related:
Breakthroughs, Acquiring minds, The needle and the damage done, More 
- Breakthroughs
Tufts University Art Gallery's "Sixth Annual Juried Summer Exhibition" is one of those summer sampler shows that's got about a million people in it.
- Acquiring minds
Given that virtually every activity in our lives is experienced through purchases, the exhibition’s focus on branding is sure to resonate with those of us facing post-holiday bills.
- The needle and the damage done
Katherine Porter is known primarily as an abstract painter. But she's always made her work distinctly her own, imbuing it with symbolism and a visionary consciousness
- Karma chameleon
“Kesa” is the term for the traditional, oblong prayer robes worn by Buddhist monks in Japan — and this spiritually rich garment is the subject of Betsy Sterling Benjamin’s “A Sense of Place, an Artist's Tribute to the Seven Continents,” which opens at the Peabody Essex Museum on December 16.
- Bought and sold
So I’d like to declare that art about consumerism is one of the æsthetic trends of our young millennium.
- Technopolis lost
It was a grand vision. Maybe even a noble one. “TECHNOPOLIS.”
- Across the Universe
Intuition tells us that certain places are powerful, that certain spaces are sacred, and that we are sometimes in the presence of cosmic energy.
- Locomotion commotion
The DeCordova Museum’s “Trainscape: Installation Art for Model Railroads” is a great, wild, flawed 14-artist circus.
- Live at five
The Tufts University Art Gallery has taken the off-season opportunity to celebrate its year-round neighbors.
- Return to the edge of the world
Photography and new media loom large on the horizon in 2007, with cameras pointed in every direction.
- Dreaming of celluloid
Of the handful of contemporary Asian shows on view in and around Boston this winter, that of Dinh Q. Lê should prove unique — if only because the Vietnamese condition is so far removed from the rest of East Asia’s cultural boom.
- Less
Topics:
Museum And Gallery
, Tufts University, Painting, Visual Arts
