| Baltimore City Paper Out of This World: Two Ab Ex-ers and a Mongolian Painter Transform and Transport at Gomez Gallery By Mike Giuliano Argentine painter Martha Zuik does not do preparatory sketches for her abstract oil paintings. Instead, as she explains through a translator at the Gomez Gallery, her paintings are "all from my imagination, from the unconscious. I work intuitively." Zuik's colorful brush strokes go onto the canvas and, in effect, decide for her what feels like the right thing to do next. She's constantly adding and revising, which in her case means adding a painterly passage, sanding it down, and trying out other layers on top of it. Eventually, the painting seems complete. These brushy and often busy abstractions incorporate enough greens and blues to prompt landscape associations. Indeed, Zuik says the landscape usually serves as an inspiration. A painting like "Deside Mi Balcon" ("From My Balcony") suggests as much, but its landscape-evocative palette does not serve realistic representation. If you wanted to see this as a total abstraction, you certainly could. There's no reason to question Zuik's reliance on inspiration and her dedication to complete abstraction, but her working method occasionally results in paintings that seem arbitrary in nature. Why this block of one color here and that block of another color there? The compositional randomness is partly offset by the nature-conjuring palette, the layering effects, and the Arshile Gorky-like knack for painting abstractions that sometimes flirt with turning into biomorphic forms. When her sources of inspiration and her working method really click, Zuik comes up with beautiful paintings that speak to the essence of nature. "En el Mar del Tiempo" ("In the Sea of Time") features blue, yellow, and green areas that melt into each other like either a body of water or an expanse of time that stretches out to the point where it seems to flow in a way beyond our usual minutes-and-hours means of measuring it. A similar meltdown occurs in the best painting in the show, "Rayos de Sol Atravesando el Paisaje" ("Rays of Light Crossing the Landscape"), in which--shades of J.M.W. Turner--a light-suffused landscape verges on becoming all light. If Zuik is attracted to the earthy and maritime colors that largely define our planet, a second abstract painter exhibiting at Gomez, a University of Maryland, Baltimore County graduate working in Washington named John McGarity, seems more interplanetary in orientation. He typically anchors his mixed-medium paintings with large circular forms or outlines with planetary associations. These astral connections are reinforced by the small, black-outlined circles orbiting the central orb. Are these pictures of the heavens? Certainly, the painterly passages partly obscuring these ostensible star charts make you think about gas clouds acting like outer-space air pollution. An alternative explanation for what you're seeing is that these markings are more akin to a prehistoric artist depicting the heavenly lineup in a dots-and-arcs manner. The exact significance of such markings--and of the people who made them--isn't clear to modern viewers, so McGarity's paintings invoke mysteries not likely to be solved simply by taking a longer look. It's pleasing that McGarity's work supports both astronomical and cave-art readings, but it'd be interesting to see what would happen if he pushed a bit further in either direction. The third artist in this show, Xue Mo, is worlds removed from Zuik and McGarity--and not just because she's a representational painter. Xue Mo is a Mongolian painter now living in Beijing, a downright exotic artist's bio for gallerygoers in the Patapsco River drainage basin. And ethnicity is directly to the point in considering her oil paintings, which are generally portraits of women whose facial features and spare but bright peasant costuming stand out against peaceful, near-empty rolling Mongolian landscapes. What's striking here, beyond the expected folkloric appeal, is that these portraits have an iconic stillness that recalls Western European Renaissance portraits of women. "Two Kinds of Different Flowers" depicts a lovely woman whose serenity is communicated by the calmness of her almond-eyed expression, and even by the few plants behind her that seem to be growing there so that art historians can come along and decipher their allegorical meaning. © 2002 Baltimore City Paper.
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 Xue Mo, Mongolian Glow: "Blue" |
