John Wickenberg
at Perimeter, through February 7
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Born in 1944 in Coleman, a small northeast Wisconsin town, Wickenberg now teaches at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. In childhood he drew from nature; he also copied Rembrandt etchings and popular book and magazine illustrations. Later, he especially liked DŸrer. His hope, he told me, is to “give the viewer an opportunity to slow down and see in a different light. If an object is painted or drawn with care and a little intensity, one might slow down and think about it, about nature, a little differently.” But the apparent simplicity of his works and goals is somewhat deceptive: aware of the split between his vision and the modern world, he makes art that isn’t quite as naive as it first seems–or as he first sounds. For all his skill, his paintings lack the diamond precision of DŸrer’s, but many of his works contain, if not postmodern Chinese-box layers, at least one level that acknowledges the anachronistic nature of his quest.
But what finally makes Wickenberg’s work so affecting is his melancholy acknowledgment of the impermanence of his subjects. If DŸrer’s certitude was a product of his Christianity, Wickenberg evidences no belief in transcendence: he leaves us with the fact that the living things he depicts, like the very paper he paints on, must eventually decay. It’s also noteworthy that, where DŸrer most often used a white ground, in 13 of the works in this show Wickenberg has painted the ground a solid black.
With the broad brush strokes and garish colors of neo-expressionism, Lazzari paints the backyard swimming pools of southern California, often at night, which adds a certain strangeness to her bathing suit-clad subjects. Painting from photographs, and sometimes modifying their colors by computer, Lazzari focuses on the pools’ underwater illumination: her figures are often swamped in or silhouetted by light, which seems to fill the water like a substance. In Absorbed a yellowish light washes over the pink skin of a man floating on his back, creeping up his side to his belly button. The couple and young girl in At the End–based on a snapshot of Lazzari with her husband and child–stand in an oval pool filled with reds and yellows and purples.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): “Amber” by Margaret Lazzari/ “Letting Go” by John Wickenberg.
