Here’s an excerpt from, and visual interpretation of, my debut novel, Make God Laugh, by the sweet, talented, and poetic fellas at Wolves.Creative (my brother Dylan’s digital marketing firm out here in Midway, Utah.)
For the English painter Alex Gibbs, the turn toward domestic scenes happened as the result of COVID restrictions, and becoming a father. His gaze was pulled by protection and focused by joy - or maybe it was the other way around. In his mostly small scale and colorful works, we find playgrounds filled with what appear to be energy spots that read as residues of wonder, and toys like train tracks and building blocks, scaled to scrape the infinite sky of childhood, that seem to be giving up or or off their spirits as riffs on Constructivism. They reward close and careful looking.
The Chilean artist Magdalena Paz frequently paints moments of release, or at least attempts of it. Sometimes it’s stretching athletes, in groups or single figures, limbs extending, contorting, searching, perhaps finding the comfort in discomfort, their faces obscure and disproportionate in size and scale to their bodies, so who’s to say if they find what they’re after. We can’t tell. And then there’s another mode, one of repose, another release, but not from the body, rather from the world and its vast assortment of pressures, tensions, and contortions.
Friedrich Franke’s small scaled oil paintings have remained with me since I first showed them almost 12 years ago - and I’m sure I’m not the only one who can still feel their presence long after they’ve been seen. They’re emotional loadstars, moody and wise, somber and poetic, aware of our gaze and careful with that knowledge. They’re never arranged the same way - their meaning shifting through proximity and context, order. Stories emerge and disappear, quiet moments of introspection, loss and promise, dreamscapes and the revery that sometimes accompanies hard looking, as well as chapters, individual days, seasons. Time is everywhere and nowhere.
The Norwegian artist Øystein Aasan has created a pair of works that strike at the heart of poetry and painting - loss, impermanence, memory, the savage act art attempts to recover the very substance of existence. The painting on the right is part of an ongoing attempt to map out the various war memorials the artist visited as a child. The work on the left - is it a drawing? An acrostic? A crossword? Closer inspection reveals it is a section from Rilke’s early poem, Book of Hours. As the artist transcribes the poem, the letter stencils he uses run out - so the poem continues in pencil beneath. A beautiful metaphor, I think, for what the soul offers the body in its ultimate failure.
Mira O’Brien’s most recent paintings remind me of the title of Jorie Graham’s first book of poems, “Hybrid of Plants and Ghosts”, a phrase borrowed from Nietzche to describe a human’s composite nature. Graham’s early poems announced a radical, electric vision of ironic contradiction, a deciphering of self and place, of nature and language. In short, a hymn to connectedness in the guise of fragmentation. O’Brien’s paintings work in much the same way, offering colors as pulsations, natural forms as conduits, details as tersely phrased aphorisms.
