Thom O'Connor's large, luscious prints dominate the three one-person shows
at the University Art Museum.
They are richly visual, highly controlled works
from a master printmaker, which is enough to make a show worth noting. They
also serve as a sendoff for the artist, who is retiring after 37 years of
teaching in University at Albany's
Art Department.
To accompany O'Connor, and as part of a semester-long examination of Irish
culture on campus, there are large black and-white photographs by
Steve Pyke,
and a small show of mildly erotic works by Richard Callner.
Certainly, a retrospective of O'Connor's work could have been in order. I
know I'd appreciate seeing the whole range of his output, which is
considerable. The show includes only recent works, but it is still a
wonderful way of celebrating an active artist with a lot of energy and ideas.
There are several different but related bodies of O'Connor's prints:
small- to medium-size dark bluish/black intaglio or polymer gravure
impressions, large black relief prints with sharp edges of white cutting
through the ink, and large orange intaglios and monotypes with a soft,
blurred sense of motion and light.
In the heavy relief prints called "Night Signals," the impressionism is
clarified and even more abstract, with a few hard lines
intruding in the pure blackness like blades of grass. "A Day on Mars" is
perhaps less like blurred light than blurred motion, as orange
waves swirl over a pane of ground glass.
Whether cast in strong orange-red pigments or kept to a basic inky black on
white, the effect is always a kind of modernized impressionism, romanticized
scenes of Monet. Yet, it is suggestive and attractive in the same broad
manner.
For any viewer seeing all 52 works at once, the works may appear too similar.
Even moving from the orange abstractions to the dark blue ones, or to the
harder black ones, the works are dealing with parallel issues in a comparable,
optical manner. But this show may be unfair to the artist, because you might
typically find them one at a time in a museum or a living room. Perhaps the
advantage to this abundance is their insight into how an artist works,
playing with small nuances that are ultimately part of the success of each
piece, singly or en masse.
When works are as completely abstract and without expressive marks or effects
as these are, the effect can too often be purely formal and decorative.
There is little to think about, and frankly little to feel, in such works.
O'Connor's prints survive because they have unusual visual sensitivity, show
extraordinary craft. There is an undercurrent of drama that suggests, without
delineation, a very human dimension to the works.
Rising above the decorative is difficult and
rare, and O'Connor has made objects of sincere beauty.
There are a few more, rather small O'Connor prints near the base of the
stairs, and these are a good counterpoint to the broad washes of texture seen
elsewhere. Called "Spaces," they have a surprising amount of information,
looking vaguely like black-and-white photographs. Each maintains
a soft-focus sense of light, but the rectangles and diagonals solidify to
form spaces, all refined, as usual, by a sense of falling light.
Up the stairs, Steve Pyke's large, square, black-and-white photographs are by
contrast completely sharp and resolved, showing a few people and places in
Ireland. They are so classically serious and gritty that they could have been
taken in another era, such as
Bill Brandt's 1940s. Actually, they are fairly recent photographs, which
appeared first in the photo-novel, "I Could Read the Sky," and they evoke a
timelessness that is perhaps only a myth. Knowing anything about the images
is nearly impossible, as the artist
requested there be no captions or dates, and the original book was unavailable.
In particular, you notice the portraits of rugged people in country places,
taken with poignancy and nostalgia. Is Pyke aggrandizing, or could it be that
these people may in fact, be living close to the land and close to God,
strong, simple, and (to some of us) leading enviable lives?
Whatever the case, there is little revealed except the broadest stereotypes.
We are given only faces, sometimes inexplicably interesting, or details in
the features, but little else. Likewise, the handful of landscapes manage to
evoke the countryside in an all-too-familiar way. A couple landscapes have an
unusual atmospheric effect. There is one portrait of a girl and two women,
which is especially striking. Otherwise this show is just nice enough to last
you while you look at it, not a minute more.
Richard Callner's small group of water colors are studies for illustrating
"Four Love Poems," by John Montague. Callner's trademark landscapes, with
their striped and curved valleys and hills, serve as the basis for giant,
headless female figures that are draped and splayed like corpses over
the horizon. Corpses are certainly not the intention, but these akimbo
figures are one man's image of love: a woman who is, above all else,
accessible.
Two of the four poems reinforce this sentiment, revealing Montague's very
male focus on the crude physicality and terminology of sex. The other two
poems go much further, and though less sensational, are delicately perceptive
and beautiful.
By William Jaeger
Special to the Times Union
Though distinguishable from each other, each group gives a similar impression
of light falling into a room, or of looking into a landscape through a fogged
lens. Everything is left underlined. In the color intaglios called "A Walk
by the Sea," it is as if we are seeing through a layer of thin fabric,
with patches of light hovering within vague dark recesses.
