WESTERN EXHIBITIONS 119 N Peoria, Suite 2A Chicago, IL 60607 312.480.8390
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In Gallery 1: Carl Baratta Light Up and Be Wonderful!
In Gallery 2: Dead Center / Marginal Notes: Holt Quentel Curated by John Neff
Carl Baratta Light Up and Be Wonderful!
Western Exhibitions opens its second show in its new location in Chicago�s West Loop gallery district with a show of �adventure� paintings on panel by the Chicago-based artist, Carl Baratta. Please join us for the public reception on Friday, October 17, from 5 to 8pm . Carl Baratta�s wildly-hued, multi-layered, tempera paintings on panel are Frankensteins, mash-ups of the art and culture that the painter immerses himself in, from Persian miniatures and European illuminated manuscripts to Glam Rock fashion and Kung-Fu films to new inspirations like Goya, Albert Pinkham Ryder and Midwestern visionary artists. He drops the viewer into open-ended narratives, primarily landscapes, where winds swirl menacingly, plant tendrils rise up from subterranean depths, rivers bend violently and mutant figures do battle or find themselves in desperate isolation. If this all sounds gloomy, Baratta�s color-drenched, intoxicating surfaces make for a lively viewing experience. Liquid strokes of crimson, hot pink and bright orange paint reveal themselves to be terrifying tree limbs; a cavalcade of tiny hash marks juxtaposed against a wash of lavender and silver proves to be scrub near a mountain lake; a massive, scaly yellow blob announces itself as a large landscape and/or some sort of futuristic dragon. In addition to Baratta�s sublime paint and color handling, he utilizes glam rock looks from the Seventies and rubber suits from Japanese monster movies to undercut the heaviness.
Baratta is striving for both a visual and psychological place of unrest, where the narrative isn�t fixed and neither are the spatial conventions of the landscape. Mountains soar, rivers bend, rushing water pulsates, caves envelope figures, yet the picture plane itself is flat, in a sense, leveling the playing field, assigning specific elements such as warring mutants, dancing glam rockers, mountains, trees, dales, valleys and bodies of water as equal partners in a psychological unease.
This is Carl Baratta�s first solo show in Western Exhibitions main gallery, after participating in a two-person with Iva Gueorguieva in 2007 and group shows at the gallery. Recent shows have included a solo at Vox Populi in Philadelphia and group shows at the Carl Berg Gallery in Los Angeles, Lump Gallery in North Carolina and Green Lantern in Chicago. Baratta received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005 and currently lives and works in Chicago.
Dead Center / Marginal Notes: Holt Quentel Curated by John Neff for Western Exhibitions, Chicago
Show dates: September 5 to November 15, 2008
Dead Center / Marginal Notes: Holt Quentel is the fourth in a yearlong series of shows curated by John Neff for Western Exhibitions' Gallery Two. Each show in the program will present one piece each by two artists or a small selection of works by a single maker. All of the works exhibited will deal - directly or indirectly - with the relationships of centers to margins (culturally, geographically, politically and within works themselves as a formal concern). The fourth show in the series, opening September 5th, presents artist Holt Quentel's large-scale painting Black 3 Gesture (B/W) Rope of 1989.
After receiving her education in Chicago and Princeton, the artist Holt Quentel (American, born 1961) rose to sudden prominence in New York's art scene of the late 1980s. Typically, Quentel's works were large-scale unstretched paintings resembling battered awnings, signs and tarpaulins. In creating these works, the artist first hand-crafted, and then carefully distressed, her canvases' surfaces. When first exhibited, the paintings' denial of a transparent relationship between process and appearance - a defining characteristic of painting after Minimalism - was often read through then-current theories of "simulation," notably Jean Baudrillard's notion that Postmodern culture values impressions over actualities. Likewise, contemporary critics related the artist's frequent allusions to the history of abstract painting to the appropriationist tactics of 1980s photo-conceptualists and Neo-Geo artists.
However, as these paradigms of art criticism faded in the early 1990s, critical attention soured on Quentel's art. Her rapid career success was characterized as a symptom of 80s art-world excesses, and her work was dismissed as faddish decoration. Quentel's last solo exhibition was held at Stux Gallery in New York in 1992; shortly thereafter she left the art world. Although she may or may not continue to practice painting, there is no available record of Quentel exhibitions during the past sixteen years.
Despite her initial reputation as an avatar of modish "Simulationist" painting, Quentel's work evades easy categorization and is not hidebound by period concerns. Her pieces are replete with unexpected formal devices, moments of striking painterly expression and virtuosic trompe l'oeil surface treatments. Still, the paintings resist reification, and often appear to be waste products rather that calculated visual expressions. (In this last respect it is, perhaps, interesting to see Quentel as a precursor of Abject Art rather than an endgame appropriationist). The artist's paintings are not necessarily dreary Postmodern souvenirs of the lofty aspirations of twentieth century abstraction; they can also be read as meditations on the practices of attention that cause artifacts to shift into and out of legibility, and thereby of fashion. Rags to riches, and vice versa.
The alteration between the exemplary and the rejected embodied in Quentel's paintings was bitterly recapitulated in her career as an artist. Viewing Quentel's art from outside the frame provided by theoretical debates of the 1980s may surprise contemporary audiences with uncommon aesthetic encounters. Likewise, attention to the story of her career provides instructive insights into how meaning and status in art are the two forked extensions of a single movement; discourse constantly advances both effects towards - and retracts them from - specific art and artists with the quick, relentless flicks of critical tongues.
By John Neff
The curator and Western Exhibitions wish to thank everyone at Stux Gallery for their assistance in realizing this project.
