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Gallery blossoms
John O’Reilly, Gerry Bergstein, Randall Sellers, and Toshio Iezumi
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS


The tumultuous elegance of John O’Reilly’s black-and-white photo collages — they read like orderly dreams, seamless sequences whose logic is wholly internal, mysterious — makes viewers do something you don’t see much in art galleries these days. People look hard. They study. They get up close to frames to make out fragments of forms and illegible print, trying to identify the origins of this cropped nude or that amphora shard, this reference to classical antiquity and that view of a suburban neighborhood.

The search that O’Reilly’s collages invite and almost demand is enhanced by their complexity and small scale — most measure in at about four inches tall and 15 inches wide — but they provide a far richer experience than merely making you squint. The scrutiny of any one of his panoramas begins as an effort to name and recognize, since the artist draws on the familiar and the seemingly familiar to create his compositions. Are the giant vases in Studio Garden in Winter from Maxfield Parrish? Is that a Matisse figure on a postcard to the left? But soon the search broadens and deepens. What does it mean that nothing stands straight or complete? What’s the relation of the clothed man petting a dog (he looks as if he’d been scissored out of a family album) to his undressed counterparts on the other side of the frame? Why do the nudes refer to art, and why do they crowd around a view of a suburban street?

Even unanswered, the questions O’Reilly’s creations provoke are satisfying; his art inspires interest and involvement without inducing anxiety or manipulating our sensibilities. That’s partly a function of the utter privacy of the worlds he creates. Poised at the edge where lasting art forever balances, these meticulously orchestrated assemblages remain deeply personal even as they allow us all to participate, to enter.

In my family, one of the games adults play with babies is a variation on peek-a-boo — make a visor over your forehead with your hands and invite the infant "into your house." I was reminded of that game while taking in O’Reilly’s work. Suddenly you’re in a shadowy place up close to someone. Each of these panoramas comes across as a complex, magical room where you’re invited to wander. The vertical layering of narrow and alternately dark and light forms at the center of Studio Garden in Winter — compare their accordion-like contractions to the open expanses at the far sides of the piece — has the effect of pulling you into the center, as if the lighted areas were street corners around which you could peer. At the middle of Around Benjamin Britten, a pair of photographs lean against each other to create a teepee, inviting you to imagine yourself inside the work in a different way. In Old Albums, a dark stone archway opens onto a street scene, as if to channel you out from the cluttered wealth of images to the left.

One departure that "Panoramas" represents for O’Reilly is that by working in relatively thin, horizontal stretches, he gives the compositions a narrative, almost cinematic sense. Yet they resist being read from left to right, and they court narration without telling a story or playing coy. They don’t tease, they challenge. In each collage, the juxtapositions are technically smooth, visually harmonious, and psychologically jarring. A hand reaches out of the ceiling in Old Albums; a Tupperware container balances beside a naked man in Around Benjamin Britten; an enigmatic, seemingly fetal figure (is it a person, a wood chip, or a carved bird?) curls up on the floor in Studio Garden in Winter.

No less compelling is the evolving eroticism of O’Reilly’s imagery, its increasing subtlety (it was always subtle), and in some ironic ways its growing importance. Homo-eroticism has always formed a crucial aspect of his idiosyncratic fractured, art-drenched domestic interiors. In the past, the sexually charged male figure (In Eakins’ Studio, from 1985, or Self Portrait with Mark Morrisroe, from 1996) provided the centrifugal force of the imagery: everything surrounding the dead-center, full-frontal nudes seemed to spin out from their bodies. In his recent work, the idealized and the ordinary male bodies are still fundamental to their compositions. but now they’re part of the architecture.

John O’Reilly’s collages enjoy the charged coherence of dreams with their misshapen, disjointed surfaces beneath which unifying currents flow. Gerry Bergstein’s new paintings enjoy the coherence of reality with their connected, narrative surfaces beneath which chaos seems ready to erupt. Bergstein’s paintings all treat the same subject matter. In each oil on canvas, a small child or two stands shrunken in the corner foreground while witnessing a world that’s coming violently apart. And the world the kids watch — gigantic, spinning, frayed — looks like a cross between a flying saucer and a ball of string. Its outer edges teem with stray wires, as if one good pull could bring the whole thing down. Yet the skin of the decomposing black-and-white structure suggests continents reduced to psoriasis, flaking, superficial elements about to come undone.

Bergstein’s approach to these works appears more directorial than authorial. In each, the same towering, out-of-control planet occupies the center of the frame while the same minuscule witnesses, refugees from a children’s book, stare as we do with their backs to us. The essential imagery doesn’t change; what changes is the shape of the disintegrating planetary body and the number and placement of the kids looking on. And though there are only about a half-dozen of these paintings in Bergstein’s portion of the show, I found myself wishing there’d been only one or two. Each work delivers a combustible wallop, but when they appear in a group, the imagery begins to feel like a trope. It’s as if you’d spotted the dove peeking out from the magician’s sleeve.

On the same floor of 14 Newbury that the Yezerski occupies, there’s an extraordinary new show of works by Randall Sellers at the Miller Block Gallery. Sellers makes complex, graphite drawings of imaginary cities in a space about the size of a fingernail. Towers rise, trees loom, walkways wind, shrubs sprout, arches open, and hills undulate all in an area not much bigger than the hole at the center of a compact disc. Bring your bifocals and your magnifying glass. What’s pleasing about this work, beyond its zany scale, amazing workmanship, and playful imagery, is its masterful transport — we’re delivered to an unknown place that the artist makes us work to see.

One floor down from the Yezerski and the Miller Block, the Chappell Gallery features the work of glass artist Toshio Iezumi, who makes big hunks of glass conjure the voluptuousness of water, wind, and skin. Iezumi has two modes as a sculptor: either he’s layering glass — many are wall mounts, others stand freely on tabletops — in configurations so exact they read like embodiments of mathematical theorems, or else he’s fashioning big, green, see-through jellybeans that look soft enough to rest your head on. My favorite work in the show looks like a small pond from which the earth has been brushed away, an inverse conical form that appears to ripple as you circle it and light bends in its layers.

"John O’Reilly: Panoramas," "Gerry Bergstein: New Paintings"At Howard Yezerski Gallery, 14 Newbury Street, Boston, through May 4.

"Toshio Iezumi: New From Japan"At the Chappell Gallery, 14 Newbury Street, Boston, through April 27.

"Cognizantium: New Works by Randall Sellers"At the Miller Block Gallery, 14 Newbury Street, Boston, through April 28.


Issue Date: April 23 - 29, 2004
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