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A triumph for Brandeis, and a birthday salute to Ken Beck
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
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"Painting 4"
At the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, through December 7.
"Ken Beck 60th:A Retrospective Birthday Exhibition"
At the Gallery at the Piano Factory, 791 Tremont Street, Saturdays and Sundays through November 23.
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How can you not love a painter who plants a 30-foot motorboat in the middle of the gallery where his work is on display — a motorboat that sports at its helm a weird, giant, paintbrush-wielding machine that implies everything on the walls was created by an industrial automaton? Maybe you can resist, but I can’t. Jimmy O’Neal’s In Karrezza Noemata is the showstopper of "Painting4," a hilarious, unruly, breathtaking, and ultimately tender work in the dynamic exhibit at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum. Pay attention, Boston. Brandeis is back. "Painting4" is one of those rarest of Boston-area art exhibits: the space is huge; the artists are young, accomplished, and stylistically extreme; and the care given to displaying their work has been generous and exact. They’re a fortunate four. But first, a word from the foyer. You walk into the stately and streamlined Rose Art Museum and are met by an exhibit of an altogether different kind: a richly packed show of Abstract Expressionism from the museum’s holdings, with representative works by Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, and other artists who for better or worse shaped a generation. With their bold forms and often large frames, the Abstract Expressionists made me feel as if I were in the presence of armed border guards. And indeed, to pass through that exhibit to "Painting4" downstairs made the border guards appear to be protecting their grandchildren. In some abiding ways, Jimmy O’Neal, Michael Lin, Katharina Grosse, and Ingrid Calame, all born in the 1960s, are heirs to the experiments and breakthroughs (and limits) of the painters you meet in the first-floor gallery. One thing the Abstract Expressionists generally were not, however, is humorous, so to step into Jimmy O’Neal’s space is to feel a great weight lift and a near-giddiness set in. And it’s not just because the predominant color he works in is white or because fluorescent lights punctuate his ceiling-to-floor paintings. It has more to do with the message he sends via the paint-machine-toting air boat in the middle of the room. Positioned at the end of the monolithic equipment is a tremendous, ornately framed canvas-in-progress. The "canvas" is actually a panel on which somebody or something has applied curling swaths of luminous, mirrorized paint. It’s a raucous, crazy amalgam that makes two immediate and contradictory claims: painting is a hoax, and painting is magical. Aside from that one object, nothing else on the walls is framed. Instead, the six-foot-tall panels abut one another to form an almost seamless expanse of huge, shimmering shapes. Some of these gradually reveal themselves as figurative — an upside-down devil, a cartoonish face. And as you move around the room, you find other surprises in the form of embedded objects from the natural world. But it all makes sense. O’Neal’s expansiveness, which is literal and figurative, moves you from the dreamy chamber of the imagination back to mad reality. In one panel, he’s woven the shed skin of a snake into what at first looks like a purely arbitrary shape; design and disorder are one. If Jimmy O’Neal were a dancer, he’d be in the air a lot and spinning; if Ingrid Calame were a dancer, I’m not sure she’d move at all. Like O’Neal, Calame covers every inch of wall space with painting for Secular Response 2 A.R. Unlike O’Neal, she works in one color, a flat, muted green, and against one background material, mylar. The effect of her tall, continuous, abstract washes of paint is to deliver you into a meditative state, not trancelike so much as contemplative. She achieves that effect in part by not painting almost half her surfaces. The translucent, blurry, off-white mylar stands bare for large expanses against white walls, so that your eye moves from the rising seawalls of paint to moments of complete suspension — as if the enamel paint were a wave stopped in a film still. Waves of a different kind describe Katharina Grosse’s untitled site-specific painting. Grosse has painted the walls within the museum — they’re visible through the glass-fronted exterior of the building — in clouds of wispy, sprayed-on acrylic pastels. The effect is smooth, decorous, and inviting. It’s true that her work resembles that of Paul Jenkins circa 1978, but I enjoyed the prettiness. Her æthereal, butterfly-wing shapes present a brilliant, jeweled contrast to the building’s otherwise box-like design. Much as I admire Michael Lin’s conceit — he makes pedestrian art that you’re meant to walk on and lounge on — I couldn’t make sense of the way he’s treated the floorboards and the accompanying pillows. Who wants to spend time among garish, faux Pop Art flowers? His floor panels and cushions look like designs for an Austin Powers disco scene. The wall text invites lounging; the objects themselves don’t. But, hey, shagadelic, baby. IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE a painter more unlike the four featured in "Painting4" than Boston’s own Ken Beck, whose retrospective at the Piano Factory will likely prove one of the best underground shows of the season, here or anywhere. Unlike the latest wave of Abstract Expressionists at Brandeis, Beck is steeped in the representational still-life and landscape traditions of Western art. He’s a painter’s painter whose every gesture testifies to his discipline, intelligence, and skill. The exhibit, in celebration of Beck’s 60th birthday, was both curated and designed by the artist, and never has so full a show looked so good. Spanning more than 20 years of work, it demonstrates both his growing command of the medium and the emergence of his signature style, what I’ll call his wry monumentality. If Ken Beck were a poet, he’d be William Carlos Williams. His language, like Williams’s, enjoys a surface simplicity — bulbous, spoiled tomatoes, a blue plastic toy shovel, a fire hydrant — placed in the service of mystery and grandeur. The tomatoes look so visceral, they could be your own appendix on the verge of rupture; the toy shovel, towering and bright, reads like a steeple or a flag on the moon; the fire hydrant with its stunted arms and its helmet-like upper portion suggests a human body. Beck’s achievement, his near-religious celebration of the surface and the light and the texture of the most quotidian objects, is as immense as it is delightful. The Piano Factory gallery is open weekends from 1 to 4 p.m., or by appointment; call (617) 267-9060. Rose Art Museum curator Rafaela Platow gives a free gallery talk on "Painting4" at the Rose Art Museum, Saturday, November 15 at 2 p.m.; call (781) 736-3434.
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