Andrzej Domanski: Portraits
Tim Lowly: Moving Pictures
Domanski’s oil portraits seem to belong to neither the present nor the past. Four of the eight works displayed at Eastwick include backgrounds of castles, ancient cities, or pristine greenery, yet his figures’ resolute poses and traditional dress exude a startling calm that lifts them out of time. Domanski showed me an article in which Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski speaks of a desire for “serene art” that would not “attack and scream,” that lacks the aggressiveness of a modern street. But perhaps the most striking thing about Domanski’s pictures is the odd power of his bony, elongated faces. Their intensity goes beyond the expression of personality; their strangeness becomes a reflection on both portrait painting and the very meaning of the human presence.
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In her 13 new oil-on-panel paintings at Gwenda Jay Gallery, Jill Schultz carefully integrates female nudes with natural settings. Born in 1963 in Miami, she grew up in suburban Atlanta, where she spent a good deal of time playing alone in the woods. Schultz poses her nudes outdoors, repeating similar figures with an obsessiveness that makes the series seem almost like a performance. One imagines the artist dragging a red sofa to different landscapes and posing nudes on it. Viewing a sleeping nude on a couch in a field, we feel almost as if we’ve come across the scene by mistake.
“People assume that for a religious image you have to have a picture of Jesus or of some iconographically important event,” Lowly remarks. “I’m not sure that’s true. God is just as present in the transient, in the mistakes.” Yet even his apparently random arrangement of details can become pregnant with possible meanings. In the circular Stone Lake a woman walks away from us while a man walks to the left. The blur of his figure at once adumbrates and accentuates his presence, making time visible and charging his figure with apparent purposefulness. The blurred young boy in Adam charges off to the left, some parts of his body more blurred than others according to their varying movement, while behind him a staircase leads upward at a right angle to his direction. In a more traditional religious allegory, the staircase might signify the true path, contrasted with the boy’s errant direction. Yet the boy’s movement seems as charged with odd beauty–the beauty of a form becoming transparent, almost angelic–as the more static landscape behind. Lowly sees his figures as perhaps no more precious than a tree or the pebbles on a beach. I found it quite moving to see a self-acknowledged religious painter offering us the most qualified and integrated view of the human presence among these shows.
