Rosaire Appel, Belligerent Madrigal, 2022, pigment print with ink and crayon, 13 x 74 1/2 in
You’ve heard it a thousand times, “The true encounter with art is beyond words.” We are left with the experience and that should be enough. But we also have the feeling that the “true encounter” includes our wondering awareness of what is happening to us as we look.
In the case of Rosaire Appel’s art now at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, we have the encounter and the self-enquiry, in spades. The pieces are in two formats: long panoramas, and vertical scrolls. They have in common a plethora of visual incidents, and an intimation of an acutely inventive mind at work. That consciousness invites us into an antic world of fragments, a broken graphic reality that evokes comics in their broadest scope.
Rosaire Appel, Detail, Belligerent Madrigal, 2022 pigment print with ink and crayon, 13 x 74 1/2 in
There are echoes of the anarchic energy of Krazy Kat and other classic comic strips, underground comix from the 1960s and 1970s, graphic novels, and more. The hint of these sources lies in the benday dots, the shards of outlined figures, the panel structure, and the rapidly shifting scenarios. Even more telling is the frantic humor – the sense of the tragic of the everyday, seen as a kind of situation comedy that is always falling apart.
That feeling is most clearly present in Belligerent Madrigal, with its parade of blocky, abstract personages standing their ground and facing off against each other. They communicate via the musical notations that they direct at each other, and are arrayed in an atmosphere of markings that suggest their thoughts and obsessions. Costumed in individualized, multi-colored outfits, they seem like robotic fashionistas. They are mysterious presences, and as in these works overall, the cryptic rules, with no story to decipher. We are left with the intuition that like Talking Heads, we must “Stop Making Sense”, when existential reality is so sharply apparent as otherwise.
Part of the mystery of this work is how it is made – not much information has been provided. But it seems to be both hand-drawn and composed via digital graphics, printed out, and then enhanced with color and ink. Beyond the comic sources, we can speculate on some other antecedents for Appel’s Comic Abstraction of the exhibition’s title: the imaginal dream characters of Paul Klee, and the imagistic Pop overload of Öyvind Fahlström, the Swedish artist who lived in New York in the 1960s and 70s. He wrote of his desire to “create a world of situations and actions in a contradictory and disconcerting time-space”.
In Rosaire Appel’s work in drawings, prints, and books, we have the template of her taking a graphic structure, such as writing or musical scores, and creating an abstract language of movement and oblique emotion. In this exhibition, which features a number of her intriguing artist’s books, and throughout her extensive oeuvre, the touch of the artist translates fugitive awareness into visual actuality.
Rosaire Appel, Backtalk, 2023, laser print on acetate with acrylic backing, 2 panels, 32.5 x 11 in. each
This is particularly evident in the vertical works in the show, with their myriad graphical devices that define an enigmatic scenography. As in Backtalk, with its two paired sheets, these pieces are replete with gestures, diagrams, partial images, all suspended in white space. The effect is by turn spare, dense, and explosive, as if the library of the comprehensible has been blown to smithereens. In Backtalk, dark dividing lines suggest the panels of a comic strip, and the scrolling frames of a film. There are layered passages that look like animated language, recalling the artist’s involvement with asemic writing, and writhing silhouettes – once viable images that have been stripped down for parts.
Rosaire Appel, Detail, Backtalk, 2023, laser print on acetate with acrylic backing, 2 panels, 32.5 x 11 in. each
One quality to note in Appel’s work, in the exhibition and over many decades, is its continuous flow of creating in many mediums, including photography, over 30 visual books, and recently, pieces that responds to sound. This is a model of ever-expanding exploration, continually discovering new territories of sensation and realization.
Abstract Comics: Rosaire Appel at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, 208 Forsyth St., New York, NY from July 5 to August 4, 2023
Peter Clapham Sheppard, Caledon Farm, 1935-36, oil on canvas, 73.7 x 101.6 cm
Peter Clapham Sheppard had lain in an unmarked grave for over fifty years in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery until 2018 when his name and dates were finally inscribed on a headstone. The arc of his story is a narrative of time and the persistence of art to survive it.
Unlike his more famous Canadian contemporaries, the Group of Seven, renowned for their dramatic landscapes of Ontario’s northern hinterland, Sheppard painted the great urban centres of Toronto, New York, and Montreal. Early 20th century modernism in Toronto was a variant of European Impressionism and Post-Impressionism applied to the Canadian experience. While his aforementioned peers drew inspiration from the too familiar landscapes of the Scandinavian avant-grade, inspired by a trip to the Albright-Knox exhibition of 1912, Sheppard aligned himself with the collective in New York City known as The Eight (later The Ashcan School) during the 1910s. As in the second-half of the 19th century in Paris, modernism was essentially an urban experience and Sheppard’s powerful canvases of docks, rail yards, bridge building, circuses, rural settings etc. reflected the dynamic growth and industrial expansion in Toronto at the start of the new century. It is not certain how long Sheppard’s sojourn lasted in New York City but his work there clearly attests to a relationship with painters like John Sloan, George Bellows, Edward Hopper known as the Ashcan School. As well brief encounters with American artist Julius Rolshoven.
Peter Clapham Sheppard, The Waterfront, New York City, 1922, oil on canvas, 89 x 122 cm
Sheppard’s monumental composition, The Waterfront (New York City) 1922, (above) for example, is a boldly painted canvas that evokes the smell of the sea along the New York dockside, with the city scapes behind. His Engine Home of 1919, (below) a work of bravura color, was unlike any work being created in Toronto at the time and to the eyes of a conservative, reactionary public it would have been considered hardcore Impressionism.
Peter Clapham Sheppard, The Engine Home, 1919, oil on canvas, 84 x 91.4 cm
But here is where destiny and a compelling human narrative reclaim Sheppard from an undeserved obscurity. It is the story of three lives and of three different generations beautifully intersecting one another through art over the span of three centuries – a rich and “embroidered ribbon” that unspools artfully as a novel or a work of cinema with “wonder and woe, glory and grief”. It is both a reflection on the forgotten as well as the ecstatic recovery of lost treasures beginning with Peter Clapham Sheppard whose life at age sixty unfolds into a new destiny when he meets Bernice Fenwick Martin in 1941. She, in turn, meets Louis Gagliardi in the last chapters of her own life to transform all three lives, completely, with joy, purpose, and resolution. A synopsis would go like this:
In 1941, at the funeral of artist and teacher, J. W. Beatty, the aging Peter Sheppard met Bernice Martin, also a former student of Beatty’s and a painter herself who is a generation younger. The two would spend the next twenty-four years inextricably bound by a shared commitment to art at their very cores, companionship, and love. At the end of his life, Sheppard is placed in the care of the Salvation Army Lodge with the added consolation that, he was literally only steps away, that is, across the street from the home for which Bernice his last friend and support, lived in. When Sheppard died, he left Bernice the only asset he had: all his artworks, a lifetime of his artistic legacy, wherever they might be found.
Peter Clapham Sheppard, Lower New York, 1922, oil on canvas, 122 x 89 cm
In 1987, Louis Gagliardi saw a painting in a gallery which he purchased. “It just spoke to him” as the saying goes. A name and address on the back impelled him to get into his car to meet the artist. It led him to a Salvation Army Lodge and to Bernice Fenwick Martin. She was a petite woman in her eighties who carried herself with an old-world dignity. Gagliardi could not know it then, but this countenance belied her tragic ruin and fall from “riches to rags”. Having been defrauded and dispossessed of her home, her wealth, and all her possessions years before, she was now given charitable shelter. The poignant irony to this chapter is that, located in the very small bedroom to which her world had now been confined, a window looked out to the very house and happy life she once knew and lost, a cruel and painful daily reminder, there across the street.
This is a story of humanity and kindred friendship, despite the many years that separated Bernice and Louis in age. They shared a bond of the highest and rarest kind— the love of art: one having lived the active life of creativity; the other committed to the pursuit of knowledge. Over time, as Bernice recounted the dispossession of all her property and life savings years before, she told Louis how she wept most despairingly for all of the Sheppard paintings once entrusted to her safekeeping. She was powerless to stop those strange men, the movers ordered by the bank, whose job it was to load trucks of the great stacks of canvases that were all that remained of one man’s prolific life.
Peter Clapham Sheppard, Snowstorm Montreal, c. 1921, oil on panel, 21.6 x 26.7 cm
Sheppard and Bernice’s loss inspired a purpose that would occupy the rest of their lives. Bernice and Louis set about to reclaim whatever artworks by Sheppard they could locate, although hundreds of sketchbooks, oil panels, and canvases had been lost, stolen, and sold off in bulk containers at garage-sale prices. It was at one location, on such a quest of her direction, that their hopes were initially dashed until, by dint of physical exertion on the part of Gagliardi, a cache of wondrous artworks by Sheppard revealed themselves in the dank and dingy darkness of a common storage space. The expression of speechless joy on Bernice Martin’s face when they looked at each other by the light of a handheld flashlight will be one of Louis’ imperishable memories. In that instant Bernice was reunited, not only with the man she loved and admired, but with the legacy he had left her, out of love and friendship and gratitude. It was as though all the preceding years of waste and loss were suddenly redeemed and fresh hope restored. Bernice Fenwick Martin passed away on September 15, 1999, just months before seeing the new millennium and two years shy of reaching her hundredth birthday.
From left: Peter Clapham Sheppard, Country Idyl, Erin Ontario, oil on panel, 21.6 x 26.7 cm, and Near Erin, Ontario oil on panel, 21.6 x 26.7 cm
Gagliardi continues his quest to honour the memories of Peter Clapham Sheppard and Bernice Martin. In 2018, he published a monograph, Peter Clapham Sheppard: His Life and Work and had the artist’s name inscribed on a stone by a resting place long forgotten.
Stephanie S. Lee, Beautiful Lady Smile & 아름다운 아가씨 웃어요, 2020, Color pigment and ink on linen, 25 1⁄4″ H x 17″ W x 1 1⁄2″ D each
“Ouroboros,” the solo show by Korean-born, New York-based artist Stephanie S. Lee, can best be described as an amalgam of influences. The Ouroboros, an image of a snake swallowing its own tail, dates back to ancient Egyptian and Greek mythologies. It symbolizes eternity and is wholly associated with Western culture. At the same time, Lee regularly uses the minhwa, or folk art, associated with presenting traditional Korean narratives, wishing and sharing good fortune and well-being among commoners in everyday life. In such work, traditional animals – tigers, dragons, and magpies – appear in the midst of modern New York City. Lee, a highly active resident in her community, to the point of having her own gallery called The Garage Art Center (www.garageartcenter.org) (her garage transformed into a showing space!), shows artists from around the city. Besides curatorial, design, and teaching Korean folk art, she paints regularly and considers herself an active artist. This show, very nicely installed within the spacious Town Hall gallery, indicates Lee’s sense of received form and an ongoing belief in doing good things, as demonstrated in her involvement with other artists and the community.
In this show, Lee combines Korean and English letter forms with images such as traditional animals, diamonds (a symbol of pure goodness that overcame hardships), or Ouroboros (the symbol of eternal destruction and reincarnation).
This series depicts her journey to finding happiness and hope while going through repetitive everyday life as a mother, wife, and middle-aged female artist. A good deal of the work in this show consists of diptychs with Korean characters, usually expressing Confucian terminology in one painting, which is then accompanied by a second, often spelling out the meaning of the Korean language in English. Other works of art include characters depicted on black diamond-shaped faux leather canvases or hanging scrolls. In her wish to merge imagery, textual references, and a nearly palpable sense of moral integrity, Lee is pursuing a language that owes its depth to Korean thought despite having lived in New York City for two decades.
Ouroboros, Solo exhibition of Stephanie S. Lee, 2022, Flushing Town Hall, Flushing, New York
Korean life in New York City, both in Manhattan and the outer boroughs (especially Queens), often determinedly remains Korean. Yet, inevitably, the city’s social structure and international culture makes its impact on all foreign cultures, no matter how insulated its immigrant inhabitants may wish to be. Certainly, this does not describe Lee’s own outlook. Instead, she embraces the diversity of New York City, even as she relies on the suggestion, sometimes overt and sometimes not, of Confucianism and Christianity for an approach to life and art. Lee studied graphic design for her BFA in Brooklyn and Museum Studies for her MS in Manhattan at Pratt Institute and learned folk art painting at Busan National University. Her work in school is reflected in her art; her paintings are exquisitely designed and are usually rendered in the naive style of the folk art she follows. In her ‘Munjado’ (Pictorial Ideograph) series, English alphabet and the Korean lettering is beautifully expressed, being indicative of the calligraphy of both culture she experienced.
Given that her art, inspired by folk tradition, reintroduces a historical Korean tradition, Lee’s work travels a long distance, both geographically and culturally. But Lee’s message is hardly antiquated; her work shows a very good sense of contemporary design and thought. On one wall, facing the viewer walking into the show, three pieces occur: in the middle, we see a large hanging scroll created in 2022. Its twisting, vertical shape establishes the symbol of infinity, with its mouth grasping its tail near the top of the hanging canvas. There are the words “useless” and “unproductive” in Korean on each snake, representing unanswered questions to herself on why she keeps creating artwork despite hardships. The symbol’s center is an open sphere created by the curves of two thin, interwoven Ouroboros, held together in the middle by a horizontal circle. On either side is a black diamond, serving as a background for single words. On the left, we see the neon-lit word “Value” in a script, and on the right, we come across the word “Art,” also in neon and written in script. When Lee presents the word “Value” on the left work, she clearly intends for the word to be understood in a non- commercial sense. (But Americans, accustomed to the economic worth of things, may take the term differently.) Her use of the word “Art” is universally understood in a moment. As for the Ouroboros, the snake symbolizes infinite possibility–from a Western point of view.
Stephanie S. Lee, Ajumma & Mother, 2022, Natural mineral color pigment and ink on linen, 46 1⁄2″ H x 24 1⁄8″ W x 1 1⁄2″ D each
Lee is giving the nod to different traditions as she works. It can be asked if the incorporation of Western mythology with the Asian folk imagination is a bit awkward; my own feeling is that, in the case of the work discussed in this show, Lee’s strong skills in design allow her to make use of the different cultures. She incorporates the imagery that is familiar to her into a vocabulary of her own making. The piece called Ajumma (2022) of the Korean characters
meaning ajumma, which in English can be understood as a married or a middle- aged woman. In Ajumma, Korean writing is intertwined with a snake made out of gems, while on the periphery of the image, several peonies, in dark or light blue, ornament the composition. In the painting Mother (2022), the word “mother” is presented in capitals and is less difficult to see. On either side of the English word, two white snakes, vines circling their bodies, mirror each other’s curves to form the shape of a uterus. On the lower half of the snakes’ bodies, luxury jewelry in reds resembling the color of blood is hanging, while at the top, a crown of brown thorns is also decorated with them. Religion is strongly followed within Korean life, and the artist agrees with both Christian and Confucian thought.
Stephanie S. Lee, Traditional Wish, 2015, Natural mineral color pigment and ink on Hanji, 48″ H x 36″ W x 2″ D
Animals like tigers take up Lee’s imagination, as the artist remains devoted to the minhwa style and themes she admires. They represent strength and power and are perceived in a supernatural fashion as a guardian spirits. It is exceedingly hard to take a folk art theme and contemporize it in a way that does not do damage to the subject’s original implications. Sadly, we are living in a time when human overpopulation and subsequent development of natural lands are depriving wild animals of their habitat. But the large cats remain large in Lee’s imagination, often standing for human virtues that remain as guides to bravery or even a heroic stance. In the tigers I have seen portrayed by Lee, their fierce vigor is softened to some extent by the artist’s affectionate presentation. This does not mean that Lee is giving up on the tiger’s reputation for ferocity, only that within the folk tradition she is following, the animal is usually represented as less wild and friendly. So Lee’s representation is gentle and humorous rather than fierce. In her tiger paintings, she may be closest to the Korean imagination.
Stephanie S. Lee, Traditional Virtue – Filial Piety, Fraternity, Fidelity, Reliance, Propriety, Righteousness, Integrity, Conscience, 2019, Natural mineral color pigment and ink on linen, 33 1⁄2″ H x 12 1⁄2″ W x 1 1⁄2″ D each
There is a question implied by this show: Can Lee’s audience, either Korean or non-Korean, be able to effectively appreciate the painter’s merger of cultures? Can a crown of thorns coexist effectively with a folk rendition of a Korean tiger? Is the Ouroboros an image dispersed widely enough that it would make sense to Lee’s Asian followers? These questions might come close to taking over the real achievement of the art. Yet Lee’s visual skills, her adept use of both Korean and English words to complicate her message (in a useful way), and her unspoken insistence on principles provide her with the means to surpass the difficulties of a hybrid existence. In the poster announcing the show, the words “Mother, Wife, and Artist” are prominent, indicating the several roles someone in her position plays. Here the language is not politicized; rather, it is descriptive of a modern woman’s life. “Ouroboros” is of high interest not only because Lee merges influences but because she has dedicated herself to image-making despite the pressures of her daily activities. It is a good thing she pays so much attention to her art, which rewards its viewers with both visual elegance and honorable consideration.
Ripped, a solo exhibition of the works of Hans Neleman, reaffirms the truth that the destructive-creative process of collage is much like graffiti, in that it gains strength from its boldness to change a preexisting thing, space or expression no matter how powerful or benign. By using the outer edges of 1940’s illustrations of art left as remnants from past works, Neleman reveals the limits of those thoughts and visions, where the conscious and subconscious intertwine, while his process symbolizes spontaneity and an obsession with the tactile. As a result, he creates a place where structures fade, memories leave indelible marks and time begins to become one endless moment. Through his art, Neleman challenges us to experience and rethink the far reaches of what we perceive so we may move past the periphery of our experiences, where the edges that once defined the picture plane become an arresting rhythmic geometric accent.
Neleman wishes us to expand our thoughts as a challenge to our preconceived limitations of fact and expression. He creates compositions where the fringes of the past become the focus of the present, and in so doing, remakes the past as a contemporary expression, making it fresh and new and ready to breathe again. His works feature thoughts and ideas as contrasting visualizations, not just in dark and light, but in the mechanical and the organic. For instance, in Humanity (2022), we first see extreme shifts in dark and light, what Neleman refers to as “how we live together separately in opposing states, always in flux and being ripped apart by politics, war, disease. Only to be “glued” back together by time”. This overall approach to collage in Humanity forms subtle tonal changes, prompting the viewer to look more deeply, possibly seeing fleeting forms that come and go like one might observe in an adjacent apartment or office building. If that experience occurs, one could conclude that the numerous sections seen here represent individual souls, living life largely apart from others who exist just a few feet away, and where Neleman sees an opportunity for those same individuals to find community built upon common ground.
Humanity, 2022, paper collage on canvas, 46 x 66 x 1 3/4 inches
In all of the art of Neleman, we experience a visual effectiveness of each field of assembled paper fragments that are in constant flux, which in a way parodies life itself. His process has a distinctive tempo, a particular pulse to the emerging narratives that encompass many fields he has directly experienced – photography, music video, painting, assemblage – all melding into a universal language that crosses socio-political boundaries, and spans a unique depth and breadth of the human senses. The vibrant, albethey nuanced narratives, convey vague familiarities, creating fleeting references that are buoyed by a network of shapes and forms that imply movement, perspective, change and reasoning. It is as if the second we think we see something it immediately disappears, only to return again in an endless loop of fragmented truths.
Instant Poetry II, 2022, paper collage on canvas, 66 x 77 x 1 3/4 Inches
As mentioned earlier, the paper Neleman uses to create his mixed media paintings come from old books, which adds a direct correlation to the past, albeit a subtle one, since the paper used to print books several decades ago will darken over time. Since the paper is no longer stark white, it both softens and supports Neleman’s desire to simultaneously embrace and displace time. Also in Instant Poetry II (2022), the artist reconstructs a collective memory; not to simply resurrect the past, but to retrofit the old through a contemporary lens that seeks balance, purity and universality. Overall, the composition of Instant Poetry II creates a very subtle vortex which draws the viewer’s attention toward the center, which appears to be receding. As it happens, that pull creates depth, while a general feeling of another dimension comes to the fore in this and all of Neleman’s works. In the end, we are left with compositions that straddle time, engaging the viewer as we look to the future. when our differences will be embraced and celebrated.
Ripped opens on October 12th and runs through November 15th at the Jean Jacobs Gallery, 84 Main Street, New Canaan, CT. The Opening Reception Saturday October 15, 6.30 – 9.00 pm.
René Moncada’s exhibition at the Jane St. Art Center beautifully presents some of his best-known artworks. These include videos of his performance art, such as: footage and images of his series I AM THE BEST ARTIST René murals; his ecological performances since 1972 in Venezuela educating the public of the dangers of contaminating the environment; the sculptures of knotted string woven on live models which he identifies as living sculptures; and fascinating sculptures created with Styrofoam and found objects. Much of his work is controversial and still provokes outcry from a wide range of critics. One such work presents a female figure entitled “Miss Construed.”
René arrived in NYC in the early 1970s, where he began a lifelong relationship with his wife Joanne. With her help he focused on his art and was on his way, exploring and experimenting with challenging ideas and materials.
One such work is I AM THE BEST ARTIST René, a huge street mural painted on a 50’ long wall at street level in Soho from the 1970s – 1990s. This was not a static piece. It was tagged over repeatedly by other artists and then repainted over and over by him, a constantly evolving artwork, a constant performance piece. Jane St. Art Center has on display videos and photos of him working on this wall, a fascinating look at an artist in action, engaging with his peers (often hostile to his unabashed declaration of self-worth).
While this remains his signature work, another major theme in his art is his philosophy which claims that women are Nature’s Paragon, which he explains by saying “There is nothing more powerful than that upon which every woman sits; this is indeed the seat of power.” The female vulva and labia are the foundational concept to express his world view and his struggle against censorship in art.
The essence of his work is his respect for, and love of women, and female sexual images are everywhere: discovered in a Mott’s Apple Juice label (later changed by the company!); in beautifully carved wood bas-relief; in his signature drawings of the goddess/woman in flowing labia robes; and in natural shapes like caves. These elegant drawings of forms emerging in space have a delicacy and sensitivity that deny any outside criticism of vulgarity. His daily practice of making these drawings create a quintessential record of how ‘woman as muse’ is central to his art. He has self-named these vulvic forms ‘Renés’. Perhaps unexpectedly, once you have ‘explored’ his way of seeing it is hard not to think of them as a ‘René’.
The performative aspect of René’s work is central to his practice. In one performance series, he knots haute couture string dresses on women’s nude bodies, turning them into elegant living sculptures. The photo documentation of the performance then becomes its own work of art, equally challenging and stimulating.
Moncada’s use of found materials goes back to the 1970s. The string used in his body art and the plastics and metals in his sculpture are all recycled materials. Rock forms made from Styrofoam, a material that has become an ecological dilemma, are hand painted naturalistically and heaped in massive piles or tied in found plastic chains, painted to resemble metal. He also creates ’high art’ sculptures using these ‘low art’ materials, painted to resemble bronze and rock with a dazzling deceptive reality. The rocks resemble the natural formations treasured by the Chinese people called Scholar or Spiritual Rocks, adding another level of interest.
Perhaps his finest work though is his life story, as seen told in video interviews. For example, he was brought to the United States in 1964 to play baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals. In NYC he worked as an art director and illustrator for ‘gentlemen’s’ magazines. In his own unique and highly entertaining way he tells of the women he has met and loved throughout his life and the art that ensued. His sense of humor and his unabashed passion for women’s rights and their essential power shines throughout his work.
Also available at the Jane St. Art Center are the following books:
RENÉ – I AM THE BEST ARTIST, NATURE’S AMASSADOR
DON ONE – THE FIRST ONE – THE LAST ONE – THE ONLY ONE: SAGA OF AN ESTROGEN ADDICT AND THE WOMEN HE MANAGED TO DEBRIEF
