Dan Addington
By Fred Camper
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Addington, 33, a Chicagoan, cites painterly influences from Jim Dine and Larry Rivers to Rembrandt and Caravaggio, but this series has its roots in a trip to Ireland last year, when he spent two weeks driving around looking at ruins. “In continental Europe,” he told me, “the Gothic cathedrals are still being used, still beautiful, still kept up. In Ireland you go into cathedrals and you’re still outdoors, because they’re ruins. Or you can be out in the middle of nowhere and come up over a hill and there’s this 12-meter-high sandstone cross with intricate carvings. It’s still a mystery as to what their purpose was. But I’ve read a lot about Celtic Christianity: it had more of a connection to the land and to earlier Celtic mythology. Celtic Christianity has this real ecological theme. Saint Patrick’s writings always make reference to the land–the rocks cry out, the sky extols God’s majesty.” At the same time, he says, the ruins exuded “a kind of melancholy. There’s a sense of sadness in the landscape too–it’s drizzly or raining, and you hear the wind.”
A group of seven smaller, more realistic landscapes, oils without a wax covering, reveal an even greater debt to 19th-century romanticism. In Drumcliff a carved Celtic cross towers over an abstracted landscape whose horizon shows the pale orange of dawn or dusk; in Ceiran’s Garden we see a field of crosses against a dark sky. In both paintings the crosses have some distinct details but are hardly photographic, and together their relative lack of detail and the dominating indistinct sky suggest that the painter’s nostalgia for faith is as much a subject as faith itself. Addington, a Christian, has managed to create paintings whose mournfulness suggests both belief and loss: belief in a world in which symbols still have meaning, and acknowledgment that the withering away of tradition has distanced us from their power.
Boogerman is a grotesque monster whose arms thrust forward menacingly. Yet even he incorporates nonthreatening, “feminine” elements. One hand ends in a forest of greenish spaghettilike wires, forming a plantlike maze more open than solid; the other has many colorful clawlike fingers also widely spaced. Various metal cylinders on his body resemble gun barrels, but the surfaces of many include open areas, and the openings in the solid barrels are too big for a gun, defusing any threat. Two red pistols adorn Boogerman’s waist, but next to each is a red ring that seems to echo the much smaller arc surrounding the trigger. In a pattern that recurs throughout the show, these rings provide a “feminine” counterweight to the “male” guns; every phallic shape here either contains its opposite or that opposite sits nearby.
