Strength Training

Allen Linder's equally muscular sculpture and paintings; Bank Violette's American dreamlessness; Marie B Gauthiez's excavated psyche

Allen Linder, “Man on Chariot” (photo by Mark Jenkins)

ALLEN LINDER'S PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURES ARE PAEANS TO STRIVING that celebrate the creator's own effort. The local artist's Harmony Hall Art Center show, "Imagine Being," is full of burly men in athletic stances, posed outdoors in Linder's oil paintings or standing alone in his mostly marble statues. The subjects are often closely related, but the processes are completely different. Indeed, Linder maintains separate studios for painting and sculpture.

The artist showed similar but more compact artwork at Portico Gallery in December. Harmony Hall's much larger exhibition space accommodates bigger objects, and gives each one room to flex its brawny individuality. This is advantageous not only to such representational pieces as "Man on Chariot" -- a heroic white-marble figure with hands of bronze -- but also to Linder's abstract "spheres," which are not literally spherical. These lustrous marble orbs are basically round, but their surfaces are a series of regular bulges, adding visual complexity and multiplying the possibilities for glimmering reflections.

The men in Linder's paintings are outlined, in the manner of cartoons, but their forms are richly textured, modeled, and shaded. The bodies are taut and their facial features appear chiseled, more links to their sculpted cousins. The colors are mostly earth tones, hinting at stone, set off by cool greens and blues. The pink sky of "Grandfather" is a rarity.

That oil-acrylic picture includes charcoal-like lines and recalls Ralph Steadman's canny juxtaposition of tentative and assured gestures. Most of the canvases are closer in style to those early-20th-century American realist painters who moved a half-step away from verbatim renderings. Yet the locations the figures inhabit are not urban, and tend to be mythic landscapes, often with dramatic skies. These are beautiful places, but seemingly difficult ones. Linder's hard-fought art does not portray lives of ease.

Banks Violette, “no title / (flag)” (Von Ammon Co.)

LOW LIGHT AND A BLACK, GRAY, AND SILVER COLOR SCHEME help hold together Banks Violette's Von Ammon Co. show. But the Ithaca artist's "i like america and america likes me" is almost as diverse as its subject matter. While most of the entries are small pencil drawings, the show also includes ghostly video and a deconstructed American flag made of aluminum and fluorescent tubes, its pieces leaned on each other haphazardly rather then stitched together auspiciously. There's even a small pamphlet in the style of the hectoring miniature comic books produced by right-wing-extremist Christian cartoonist Jack Chick.

Violette's art is stuffed with references, some of them as simple as apple pie: The drawings include renderings of fireworks, a beer logo, and three flags: the U.S. and Confederate standards and the revolutionary "don't tread on me" banner designed by Christopher Gadsen in 1775. Another set of pictures shows the wild dogs who seem to gallop through the gallery, projected on diaphanous screens and the ceiling. The low-definition video is carefully degraded from its source, director Penelope Spheeris's Suburbia, a 1983 melodrama about punk squatters in a downscale precinct of Los Angeles. Violette's version of this tale is recounted in his Chick-parodying comic.

The show's ultimate reference is to Joseph Beuys's 1974 New York performance, also titled "i like america and america likes me." But the German conceptual artist employed a live coyote, not video images of dogs, and dramatized his own personal mythology as much as any political message. Violette's homage is apparently not an endorsement. Von Ammon Co.'s statement calls Beuys's piece "lifeless and chillingly silly." The heroes of post-World-II art, it seems, offer little consolation. Unlike Jack Chick, Banks Violette doesn't offer the promise of salvation.

Marie B Gauthiez, “Wall 3” (Tephra ICA at Signature)

THE HOUSE IS A METAPHOR FOR THE UNCONSCIOUS in the mixed-media works of Marie B Gauthiez, on display currently in two locations. The Northern Virginia artist builds, and then excavates, walls above the existing walls in "Jardin Intérieur" and "We Dwell in Between." The first show is at Transformer, a tiny box of a venue, and the second at Tephra ICA at Signature, a hallway gallery in an apartment building. Yet the experience of each is similar.

Gauthiez's paintings and assemblages are largely chaotic, apparently to suggest inner turmoil and the mysteries of identity. Yet they're also contained, not just by the spaces into which they're packed, but also by internal devices. Amid their chunks of plaster or wallboard, many of the artworks feature grids that echo brick walls or the tiled surfaces of kitchens and bathrooms. Some pieces include repeated but decayed decorative patterns that evoke damaged wallpaper. A few sculptural collages are partly stripped to reveal systematic structural elements such as the metal lattice of "Wall 3" (on exhibit at Tephra ICA at Signature, in a show curated by Chenoa Baker).

There's a role in Gauthiez's art for straightforward collage-paintings, tidily framed. Yet these are sometimes hung amid maelstroms of installations that suggest battered rooms, and one such picture is torn to disclose a pattern lurking below. The lowest layer of these multi-level works can be glimpsed only rarely, and even then not definitively. When burrowing into the human mind, it's just not possible to dig all the way to the core.

Allen Linder: Imagine Being

Through June 14 at Harmony Hall Arts Center, 10701 Livingston Rd., Fort Washington. pgparks.com/facilities/harmony-hall-art-center. 301-203-6070.

Banks Violette: i like america and america likes me

Through June 15 at Von Ammon Co, 3210 Grace St. NW. vonammon.co.

Marie B Gauthiez: Jardin Intérieur

Through June 14 at Transformer, 1404 P St. NW. transformerdc.org. 202-483-1102.

Marie B Gauthiez: We Dwell in Between

Through June 29 at Tephra ICA at Signature, 11850 Freedom Dr., Reston. tephraica.org. 703-471-9242.