Pat Curran: A Way and Katherine Veneman: Orientation

Two concurrent painting exhibitions are on view at Wakefield's Hera Gallery. Pat Forni Curran: A Way and Katherine Veneman: Orientation run from August 24 -September 28, with a reception on Saturday, September 14, 5-7 PM.

Inspired by the landscape she encountered in Italy, particularly Bologna, Pat Curran's new oil paintings on canvas express the artist's continued interest in using memory as a starting point for her landscape paintings. Inspired by ancient city gates and their implications of protection and enclosure, the intimacy of the vernacular rarchitecture, and the quality of the warm, filtered light, Curran first sketches the landscape and architecture to make quick studies on paper.

"The experience of the city flooded my sensibility with the sense of structure, order, rhythm, and enclosure… The most formal emotive structures were often the churches; one particular group of churches with great cypresses aside, seemed an emblem of the Catholic esthetic. The embedded sense of the past, the aura of lives lived surrounds you at every turn," she observes.

This memory contained in the landscape interests Curran, whose new works become explorations of place and also of the process of painting itself, with all of its many issues that operate separately from the subject matter. Curran's new work explores territory first uncovered by Cezanne, Picasso, and Matisse, among other artists who investigated and redefined the intertwined relationship between form and content-a vital, problematic question that has plagued artists working all media, but especially painters, ever since. Above Image, "Inner Gate," oil on canvas.

Curran sheds some light on this process through the revealing title of the exhibition, A Way.

"A Way is not only a word to reflect on the other place, but also, signifies to me another way of painting and attitude towards the pictorial elements. Although the imagery is derivative of actual places I saw and drew during my stay in Italy, I have attempted…to distill the essence of my perceptions and memory at home in the studio, away from the motif," she explains.

In this distillation process, Curran appears attracted to glimpses and partial views, the intersection between the public and private life. Her buildings occupy a compressed, shallow space similar to that found in bas relief sculpture. This space is not defined by architectural elements such as rooftops, edges of buildings, or traditional one point perspective, but is determined by pictorial logic. Windows, doorways, and archways are positioned according to the artist's command. In many works, viewers are left to wonder what is behind the architectural façade, the door left ajar. These works are not revealing, rather they are seductive in their lushly colored and textured surfaces, which though full of possibility, are impossible to enter. Image Above: No Entry, oil on canvas.

Including heavily painted canvases, ink washes, and text-based works with minimal paint application, Katherine Veneman's new work is nevertheless united by the idea of orientation. In the past, painters working within the formalist tradition relied upon the creation of a visual hierarchy to present viewers with a universally readable picture plane. In contrast, Veneman's work presents a subjective surface to be interpreted differently by each viewer. This idea of orienting oneself, or of failing to do so, functions as a metaphor for the larger way that we navigate the world around us.

Visually dense and saturated with color, the first group of paintings explores a purely perceptual idea of orientation by using visual motifs that require viewers to locate themselves in disorienting landscapes. Both viewer and painting are caught in a state of flux. Continually changing their structure and meaning, the suggestive forms in these works appear to be the result of both natural and man-made events and inhabit a blurry region between construction and destruction. These paintings, therefore, reveal the unexpected and awkward juxtapositions shaped by the passage of time.

Veneman details this process:

"To produce this effect, I confront the viewer with multiple vantage points and create a subjective surface that is not immediately accessible or easy to decipher. Color is used both to identify and unite areas of the canvas and to disintegrate logical patterns of space. Distances are contracted and lengthened to include an array of information as the viewer relies on orientation skills to travel through the canvas -- uncovering hidden nooks, stormy skies, and new passages along the way."

This interest in pictorial navigation and orientation stimulated Veneman's curiosity in some of the ultimate lost travelers, the European and Anglo-American explorers who "discovered" the Americas, including Christopher Columbus. From reading both their own writings and the work of contemporary historians, emerged a portrait of resourceful individuals attempted to use whatever navigation skills they possessed to chart new territory.

"As a painter who daily faces the shifting reality of a changing canvas, this interested me," Veneman says.

The diptych, Orientation, comments on the ways in which history is recorded by presenting yet another view, a kind of an impossible, imagined visual conversation between Columbus and today's communicators of American history. On the first canvas, Veneman transcribed in pencil elements from primary sources in various orders, sometimes interspersing them with my own thoughts on the subject as seen from the fictionalized vantage point of a historical character. Pictorially, these words comprise the armature of the painting. Both canvases include a fluid, minimal drawing in oil of a map, based on a 15th Century map seen in the Vatican Museum in Rome. Waves of glitter are added throughout, clouding and illuminating the surface of the seemingly bare canvas and presenting a gilded patina to represent the "lens of time."

By mapping a complex terrain or by representing a view of navigation, Orientation as a whole conveys a sense of the disorientation inherent in contemporary life.

Veneman explains, "My motivation as a painter is to make work that provides an experience that is slowly engaging, in counterbalance to our quick-response environment. The works in this series invite contemplation, and often must be literally read, which require viewers, like explorers, to find their own paths and to locate themselves."

In doing so, each viewer adds another temporal layer, bringing the painting closer to completion.

Hera Gallery is handicapped accessible, and free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Friday (1-5) and Saturday (10-4). Please contact 401/789-1488 for more information.

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