| Tchera Niyego, the curator of the “White” show at the Broadway Gallery, NYC, happens to be a woman of style and substance. Luckily for me, the show lived up to what I have come to expect from her (because there is nothing worse than having to face a beautiful woman and tell her she’d better get a day job). This is her fifth show—and I eagerly look forward to her next. The choices she made were impressive—impressive most notably for their cohesion, their absence of pop and shock value, and the stark grace of what can only be defined as confidence. |  |
Tchera Niyego, the curator of the “White” show at the Broadway Gallery, NYC, happens to be a woman of style and substance. Luckily for me, the show lived up to what I have come to expect from her (because there is nothing worse than having to face a beautiful woman and tell her she’d better get a day job). This is her fifth show—and I eagerly look forward to her next. The choices she made were impressive—impressive most notably for their cohesion, their absence of pop and shock value, and the stark grace of what can only be defined as confidence. Artists gathered: Keith Morant, Basil C. Frank, Alfredo Sabat, Alice Flight, Minako Yoshino, Norbert Schmitt, Irina Urumova, Aviva Beigel, Allan Buitekant, Al Lewis and Fuge Demirok.
Enter to Allan Buitekant whose white is neither a simple nor a pure condition. In his hands, raw clay and undecorated surfaces lay bare the function within the form. Be it time-ravaged breasts and a swollen belly or idealized flower in a smooth, almost softened purse of a pot, his work begs to be touched, to be savored. Who needs the complications of white when naked seems so much more pure?
Ask the beautiful woman of stone. When Minako Yoshino first found the stone she sculpted into Awake, her teacher told her it would be close to impossible to carve a bust from this Belgian marble. At best, they told her she could make a stand from it. There’s a saying “those that can, do—those that can’t, teach,“ and it was never more true than here. She knew, she saw this beautiful face in its soul. And now we all can. Pen & Brush gave her an award—but Awake was first shown here, beneath a deceivingly simple explosion of a white dwarf some teachers will tell you is an oil painting.
Feeling a bit more confident, despite the fact you know no one to air-kiss—ride with that feeling. Forget about labels on invitations because Norbert Schmidt’s white is anything but—as if by some strange and happy accident of the fates, he sees what the gods do and splits what we call white like a prism; he bends it to his will until all the hues of the rainbow soften, then crisply folds its rough mold for us mere mortals whose eyes would not otherwise glimpse the depth of its beauty. He gives stiff praise to the flaccid colors easily dismissed by the crude eye of terrestrial existence. Das Dreifache Bewu is a true gift of perception.
Are you floating yet? Look around. Take a breath. Look around again, just beyond your reach is Fuge Demirok’s White. Oversized droplets of manna from heaven. Landmarks you can count, solid buoys in the Seas of Soho. Swirling abstracts of whirling dervishes licked by the flames of desire, they balance improbably, caught in that moment between falling and flying, a moment of pleasure in an instant of time. A frozen and captured sweet drop of rain on a salamander’s tongue.
And before you relegate this stunning feat of balance to a mere mental marker as to where you’ve parked your car or where the exit is, take a breath. Take a nice cool breath. Inhale Keith Morant’s exhale: the blue in white. That strange and mystical blue of the icebergs—that illusive blue of the stark white snow which all our ancestors knew all too well so very long ago—before the ice age ended and the lands drifted and we began to see ourselves as separate from one another not because of distance, but because of culture or color. His white is extremely complicated—he dares to surf the fine line between the purity of solitude and the tainted reality of loneliness.
Feel dizzy? Aviva will talk you down. Not because the dance of life on earth or in what we call the heavens is anything but overwhelming, but because she speaks a truly universal language, a code: Mathematics. In Aviva Beigel ‘s world, white cannot exist without black. Her stripped-down forms explore the relationship between the two colors in strict patterns that dance in unison even as they stand stagnant when examined individually. She has invented a language. It is binary code as the new hieroglyph—all those ones and zeros that once separated, mean nothing, and, once crafted together, created everything from the program.
It is time to come back to reality, to Alice Flight, perhaps the most important artist in the “White” show. Ms. Flight’s subjects are the most troubling, and the most tangible for our time. The stark beauty of her work belies the hideous state of our affairs. Her work is honest and full of hope, although oddly lacking despair despite the gruesome nature of our, what we fools call, race-relations, as if we aren’t of one race. I could not step away from the corner where her work was installed. In a world of sound bites and “as long as we say it, so enough it will become so” new-speak, her figures stand quietly and defiantly—their silence speaking volumes. Her choices are the choices of a careful observer, of a determined aesthetic. Of simplicity. Of an artist.
Israeli-artist Basil C. Frank ’s work is so powerful and sorrowful that I had to catch my breath. His interpretation of the wave made famous during the failed Cuban friendship concerts of the 70s, and the stark reality of more recent casualties wrapped in white beneath—of dreams deferred beneath irrepressible progress, of celestial light and terrestrial futility give name to the statistic—pay respect to the forgotten and memorialize with a tenderness certain to be lost in the half-billion dollar American extravaganza all the politicians in our country keep claiming we’ll someday see.
Wait a minute—can’t somebody lighten the mood—even if it is off-color?
Yes. Alfredo Sabat is an Argentinean artist who is better known for his drawings that appear frequently in the likes of South American dailies and Playboy. As the “White” show opened, he was honored in Portugal for his disturbing caricatures. His bright colors catch the corner of the eye and then instead of something light-hearted, something awful emerges. It is not the aftermath of a horrible accident on the highway, it is that moment before the accident—we helplessly look on as his figures smile with the type of oddly seductive self-aggrandizement normally reserved for fiends the likes of Hannibal Lector or the Joker, as rendered by Jack Nicholson. And just like that accident, it’s hard to look away. And what of it? What are we anyway but well-dressed seekers of truth (so long as it isn’t an indictment of us)? Oops: Irina Urumova’s white is a stop-n-shop lonely, with hands that never feel the touch of another and pale renditions of someone else’s ideas of what the world is. Her White Body Smelled of Lilies because of low-grade deodorant and rubber duckies, and something a girl is supposed to be and all that never was from all that might have been when the zygote split and the first scented magic marker was gripped in the pudgy, clumsy fingers of the first girl who ever dreamed of flying. Hers is a carefully constructed world where bar codes and blocked ambitions are the only permanence. And no one and nothing can argue with the shadows. Urumova is telling us something—something about the perils of worrying about our appearance more and ourselves less. Something true which we’d rather not hear.
Relax now with Al Lewis. To say that Al Lewis is a very young artist with enormous potential seems pretentious. Certainly, he is young, and certainly age will render better works—but his work right now is more than what many others may ever achieve. His command of the canvas is startling. He may not be ready to look his subjects straight in the eye, but he’s already captured glimpses into their souls. He’s traversed the bogs of Wuthering Heights and mapped them and moved on and put Bronte in her rightful place of sophomoric shame. He’s borrowed the palettes of Munch with precocious mimicry and metered reverence.
Unfortunately, by the time you read this the show will have closed. If you’re smart, you’d do well to watch carefully for Tchera’s next offering.
