Impeccably Rumpled
Maggie Siner's world of creases and colors, Tom Bunnell's playful motifs, and a wealth of patterns at Gallery Neptune & Brown
Maggie Siner, “Japan Blue and Orange” (Calloway Fine Art & Consulting)
A POET OF CREASES AND WRINKLES AND THE SHADOWS THEY CAST, Maggie Siner uses texture to represent the complexity of life. The recent pictures in her show at Calloway Fine Art & Consulting employ established techniques and depict familiar subjects, yet feel entirely fresh.
There's exactly one person portrayed in this suite of loose but precise oil paintings, a woman in a dark green dress who's lying on her side atop a table draped with a white tablecloth. Siner, a sometime-local artist who spends much of her time in Venice, must have painted hundreds of such white cloths. But each one is distinctive, folded in a slightly different configuration and placed in dialogue with a variety of colorful dishes and foodstuffs.
In this selection, the edibles are mostly fruit, shellfish or vegetables. Orange melon crescents are especially vivid, in part because they so strongly contrast the blue bowl that holds them. Also featured are radishes, apricots, figs, and watermelons, rendered in bright hues that set off the cloths's whites, grays, and beiges. The resulting drama can be read as purely visual, but also as a commentary on nature and civilization. A slice of cantaloupe brings organic life to a fusty chamber.
Tablecloths aren't the only stand-ins for people. There's also clothing, often hung loosely on hangers so it's upright, almost as if being worn. Such garments can be as milky as those exemplary cloths, as in the picture of a white crop-top blouse hanging before a gray backdrop, its red tag the only glimmer of color. But other textiles are more lively: A blue dress slumps on a pale green upholstered chair, and two paintings feature a gold, orange, and blue Japanese cloth. Draped complexly over a table, the crinkled fabric bridges worlds.
Tom Bunnell, “Poolside” (Addison/Ripley Fine Art)
THERE ARE NO HARD EDGES OR IDENTICAL FORMS IN TOM BUNNELL'S paintings, and yet the pictures are systematic, or nearly so. Fabric-like patterns, similar in outline yet loosely rendered, fill some of his canvases. The D.C. artist's abstract compositions include intuitive gestures and apparent glitches, but are usually held together by a dominant color or a repeated motif.
Among the paintings in "Romantic Comedy," Bunnell's debut show at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, is "Sunspot," in which fingerprint-like gray whorls unify a plane divided horizontally between a red-brown top and a yellow-gold bottom. "Poolside" is even more orderly, with stylized blossoms in blue and green afloat on a blue surface. But a few of the florets are filled in with red, yellow dots bounce haphazardly among the blooms, and ripples flow in and around the dominant forms, offering a touch of eccentricity or even anarchy.
Many of the paintings are smaller ones from a series called "Daily Records," which appear to be attempts at working quickly and decisively. These pictures are also less pattern-oriented, emphasizing figures that resembles doodles and even graffiti. A few of the featured designs simulate such three-dimensional objects as multi-faceted gems.
The show's title refers to Bunnell's mix of abstract-expressionist grandeur and cartoonish shapes, which suggest the influence of Philip Guston. (Bunnell's sense of humor is also evident in titles like "Lingua Frank.") Grandeur sometimes dominates, however, as in the monochromatic "Let It All Come Down." The florets of "Poolside" return here, but in black on heathered gray, and bracketed by molecule-like diagrams in milky gray on a black field -- as if they'd been bleached into an expanse of night sky. Color seems essential to most of the paintings in this selection, but "Let It All Come Down" demonstrates that Bunnell can entrance purely with form and pattern.
PATTERNING LINKS SOME, BUT CERTAINLY NOT ALL, of the pieces in "Art Matters," a holiday group show at Gallery Neptune & Brown. Predominantly prints, the selection includes several pieces that are simultaneously austere and sensuous: a Linn Meyers etching of a rumpled field of dots, mostly black but with three rows of gold; a Sean Scully aquatint of overlapping, soft-edged bars of black, gray, and blue; two Paul Inglis woodblocks in which regular grids are disordered by sudden shifts of color; Erick Johnson's painting of 12 eccentric hexagons striated with multiple hues; and a David X Levine colored-pencil drawing that reduces a chapel to elementary shapes, mostly in shades of blue.
The other largest subgroup consist of depictions of nature, often painted. Among these Stephen Estrada's realistic picture of violent surf; Stone Roberts's exquisitely detailed etching of three pears; Carol Barsha's more fanciful painting-drawing of a pink-splashed garden; and Foon Sham's wooden sculpture, a chasm nestled within but its outer surface the color of water. Somewhere between the first group and the second is Janis Goodman's "Morning Paddle," a study of aqueous green shapes that could be either water or clouds. Its near-abstract forms suggest that all pattern-making begins with observation of nature.
Maggie Siner Pop-Up Show
Through Jan. 25 at Susan Calloway Fine Art & Consulting, 1643 Wisconsin Ave. NW. callowayart.com. 202-965-4601.
Tom Bunnell: Romantic Comedy
Through Jan. 18 at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, 1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW. addisonripleyfineart.com. 202-338-5180.
Art Matters
Through Jan. 17 at Gallery Neptune & Brown, 1530 14th St. NW. galleryneptunebrown.com. 202-986-1200.