LUCID DREAMING
by Beth Elaine Wilson

Make Art Not War—Bob Crimi, Nancy Catandella, encaustic and collage, 2001

By sheer luck or spark of divine enlightenment, human beings discovered the idea of, well, having ideas. With the alchemy of displacement (the distance between a thing and its representation), it became possible to think and communicate about objects and people who were not physically present. There is an alluring magic and power in the creation of images, as the artist leverages the appearance of a thing against its deeper reality. One could even make the argument that the history of humanity has been, in large part, the history of the use of the negative space between what we know of ourselves and what we appear to be.

In the early Christian church, representational images were not entirely to be trusted, an outgrowth of the Jewish proscription against graven images. (That’s the one of the Ten Commandments that seems to receive the least application today—not that the others are observed much, either.) The fear was that the representation might be mistaken for the real thing (G*d), which the Jews had even forbidden to be represented in language. Over time, the injunction loosened, and in the Eastern Orthodox tradition the practice of icon-making took hold. At once spatially flat and spiritually deep, the stylized conventions of representing the human form in these icons seemed to safeguard the images from charges of idolatry, as they did not attempt to create a believable, naturalistic portrayal of real people, while their abstraction pointed in the direction of higher spiritual/theological truths that were their real theme. You don’t look at these icons: you look through them instead.
At the Gallery at R&F through the end of March is an exhibition of encaustic portraits, envisioned by artist Nancy Catandella as “21st Century Icons.” Her aim was to make iconic images of everyday people, having a number of her friends sit for her as she created encaustic portraits of them. In most cases, they also provided small personal objects which Catandella then collaged into thick passages of the waxy medium surrounding the portrait, attributes of the subject’s personality, hobbies, or predilections. (In some cases, the artist found emblematic materials to encrust the portrait that were not necessarily personal possessions of the sitter.)

These portraits raise more questions than they resolve, however. By focusing on decidedly “ordinary” people, Catandella emphasizes their accessibility—indeed, at the opening, most of the sitters were present, chatting amiably in the vicinity of their painted portraits. But the beauty of most traditional icons rests primarily in their otherworldliness, not their familiarity. Even in the delicate, vividly alive Early Christian funerary portraits from Faiyum (cited in the press release as a source of inspiration for this series), the artists placed emphasis on and subtly exaggerated the size of their subjects’ eyes, alluding to the soul residing within the earthly body, and its ultimate transit to Heaven.

By contrast, Catandella’s icons seem preoccupied not with the interior self (or soul) of her sitters, but rather with their external appearance and the roles that they play. They are defined symbolically by means of the collaged objects that define them as “Gardener”, or “Traveler”, or “Health Care Practitioner.” The handling of the faces gives them little spatial or psychological depth, and we are left to wonder, in the play between the artist-rendered faces and the “real-life” objects embedded in the encaustic, whether we should worry about the content of our facade, or in the end is it just the face that we show the world that matters?

Another, very different sort of iconic tradition took hold in Mexico (and elsewhere in Latin America). Within the Roman Catholic tradition, paintings known as ex-votos had been common since the Renaissance, which included contemporary persons (usually the patrons) alongside divine figures. In the New World, this tradition was played off the earlier pagan practices of pre-Columbian cultures, in which offerings would be made to the gods in thanks for good harvests and the like, the common people began to make retablo paintings to commemorate the successful intercession of the Virgin of Guadalupe to heal someone’s injuries, or to pray to the appropriate saint for rain or success in love. Also known as milagros (“miracles”), these folk art paintings flourished in the 19th century with the invention and manufacture of tin-plate, which served as a ubiquitous and inexpensive backing for the image, which usually included colorful, primitively executed images of the prayerful petitioner, a saint, and a written explanation of the event or prayer in question. The crudeness of their execution averted any mistaking them for actual divine personages, while coincidentally calling attention to the distanced, iconic form of their representations.

The simplicity and direct address of this folk-art tradition have been adopted by Saugerties-based artist Jean Campbell, who lived in Mexico for several years. (The price of her paintings keeps her well within this tradition as well!) Once the leader of the now-defunct Up Front artist co-op in Kingston, she is now the featured artist in a group show at Half Moon Studio in Saugerties. Her faux naif paintings on luan plywood include conventionalized icons such as man, woman, heart, and house, along with hand-scrawled text that speaks in the idiom of stream of consciousness. While the works in this exhibit initially struck me as a bit schmaltzy (the show opened just before Valentine’s Day, and thus the theme of “love” predominates), on closer examination, Campbell maintains something of the edgy, insightful sensibility that always appealed to me in her paintings. In No Proof, for example, a prayerful-looking woman clutches a large red heart, but the writing on the painting accounts for her attitude: “She believed in love even though there was no hard evidence to prove it existed.” No withering blossom, this—like all the women in Campbell’s paintings, she is at once optimistic and self-doubting, strong yet vulnerable. These works describe the internal arcs of love, desire, and dreams, or in other words, the content of that negative space between the self and its facade.

“21st Century Icons: Encaustic Portraits,” by Nancy Catandella, through March 30 at the Gallery at R&F, 506 Broadway, Kingston. 331-3112.

Group show (featuring Jean Campbell) at Half Moon Studio, 18 Market St., Saugerties. 246-9114.