It should go without saying there are different ways to accomplish art’s essential business, that artists go about the problem with different goals and different instruments, each according to their circumstance. My own experience of the world seems to be a compulsion to summarize and characterize what has happened to me verbally and to make pictures using paper and glue to illustrate the words in my head. The artist Charles Burrus, whose latest work is at Muse Gallery during July, 2014, explores experience as a landscape or starscape of light and color, without fussing too much over the verbiage or composing a narrative. Lately, he has produced fine pieces in encaustic, the medium of colored wax.

I have followed Charles Burrus’ work for several years, and “what the medium will do” is a matter of great importance to him. His curiosity is nearly scientific. He has made previously dense works in oil paint incorporating different kinds of paper and foil which were large-scale explorations of how much light can be emitted from a thick application of dark matter. His latest work in encaustic is much brighter, less abstract, and yields much more detail in a scaled-down space. The pleasure of physically working the wax and blending the pigments comes through in the gaiety of the colors, lusciousness of forms, and the sheer delight Mr. Burrus takes from achieving a compositional semblance of tropical fauna (Parrots) or a celestial swirl, and making that likeness in a foreign medium.

The recent encaustic paintings of Mr. Burrus often refer to a visual image, but his use of the materials delightfully and serendipitously abstracts the original. He is an artist who desires collaboration with chance because he believes that by letting go of conscious intent, a connection to the grand scheme of the universe will happen. It’s the same mystic impulse that justifies casting a spread of tarot cards to learn about some present person, or consulting star charts to coordinate what happens in the firmament with circumstances here below. In Galaxy Hub, Mr. Burrus literally imposes a bicycle sprocket on a nebulous gray swirl, expressing the central belief that informs all his work to this point: that there is a plan or mechanism unfolding in the seeming chaos of history. He has used bicycle parts in previous oils bearing titles referring to mythology. The particular reference is never very explicit; it conveys a general feeling that the cosmos conforms to a godly will compatible with human understanding.

Some of the most detailed and pictorial work in the current Muse Gallery show generates from images of the night sky. In A Wrinkle in Time, a man-made (or at least earthly) construction in triangular form with a swirling patchwork of colors is positioned in the foreground of a yellow and purple, glowing galaxy churning in the cosmically distant background. Or maybe it doesn’t! It doesn’t matter: the picture relates to a classic childhood book in which the vast loneliness of space is vanquished by human understanding. Similarly, Mr. Burrus exploring the physicality of wax and pigment squeezed through a heat gun to see what pictures alchemy creates expresses a faith that human consciousness can make something of what is essentially unsympathetic and inanimate matter.

The titles and associations in Mr. Burrus’ work are playful as opposed to being prescriptive, so I think he’s not trying to convey particular traits or characteristics in the pair of works entitled Thelma and Louise. On the other hand, the reference tells us something about what the artist is trying to get across. The pair are similar to one another compositionally, but the colors are different, creating the effect of a photo and its negative; thus, a generic pairing is established, but on the other hand he’s not saying the radiant masses hurtling through a field of colored daubs is Jack and Jill. The vivid image in the eponymous film was of a definitive burst of glory happening for the moment: a Big Bang moment, final, paradoxically deterministic, but creative and expressive, too. Thelma and Louise refused to accept a world where choice was limited, fate was fixed, and feeling was stifled, so they exploded like fireworks in the sky. It’s a lovely emblem for the spirit that Mr. Burrus conveys in his output of recent encaustics, a sensibility trained to the temporary fulfillment of light and energy and a refusal to bow to the darkness.

The positions of the three women in the show's titular painting project different sorts of distraction: on a subway car, a woman applies make-up, another pulls an item from her purse, and a third is using a smart phone or some other adult busy box. The position of the women's legs conveys meaning. Without projecting a false depth, Ms. Kress attributes to her subjects a resting disconnection from the present subway car. Her skill at using body language to convey meaning reminds us that the eye perceives empirical data that can't easily be expressed in words.

Each lovely limb is synchronized with other limbs, creating a pattern that's similar to the bumpy rhythms of a train ride. Ms. Kress abstracts the window behind the seated figures, putting a glare of white on the lower third of the pane and dark polygons on the top. She places the three pretty females on their plastic blue bench with such precision, she doesn't need to fuss with the view through the window. The pattern of dangling limbs suggests the repetitious light of windows streaking past stationary facades.

Such pretty ladies. With a hand that invokes the sketchy graphics in fashion ads, Ms. Kress sexualizes her subjects. She details those lean, female bodies and composes a different chic "look" for each. The women's hair comes in all three colors of a magazine spread for L'Oreal. Dressed up and still working on their "look," the characters here are waiting to be seen but by whom? Great painting always contains a mystery, and here it's the inextricable puzzle of the gaze and its object.

Ms. Kress's equally spare but eloquent painting, Italian Cafe, induces the viewer to consider location choice as a component of a person's character. It's an Italian cafe and all that signifies, with a wrought-iron bench outside and a brilliant live landscape in the background. (I reject the notion that the couple are indoors, sitting next to a cheesy mural, because of the blue light suffusing all and the painter's penchant for elegance.) The male figure stares blankly ahead at some dead abstraction with shoulders drooping. At least, he dresses nattily!

The female in this two-person drama is more engaged with her surroundings if only because the blue of her turtleneck sweater harmonizes with the setting. Connected to the scene, she nevertheless distances herself from her companion by straightening her arm against her side and raising her right knee a couple of inches, suggesting a barricade. The man's jacket is a fleshy pastel and his face is an undetermined smear; he resembles a drooping penis. But the woman projects poise and fortitude, that Barbara Stanwyck vibe.

Ms. Kress uses a fine brushstroke to sketch outlines or suggest important details. She renders large spans of clothing, the flesh of the man's face, and the landscape with a knife. One technique brings out the dominant facts of the painting and the other suggests less articulated solids for which broad abstractions will suffice. Selective vision frames and details fashion cues in the woman's clothes, make-up, and hair, and generalizes the man's face and the picturesque Nature behind him. The picture uses composition and technique to present a disconnected couple from the woman's point of view.

In Cool Boots Nancy Kress again tells us how clothing represents the person wearing it and how the parts of our appearance that are skin-covered can be abstracted so long as the costume makes a statement. A long-haired brunette wearing a western-style shirt and knee-high boots sits in the corner of a restaurant or bar. Although her outlines and the specific shaping of the boots are distinct, their color is blue or black. The chair she sits in is a luminous yellow-- it's Vincent's chair! Ms. Kress presents a human mystery lounging in some public place where people interact, but the space she occupies and the fetish boots she wears are more important than herself.

Cool Boots is a simple painting but a gorgeous one. Ms. Kress uses her knife again and layers the blue paint like she's icing a cake. For the important objects in the composition, a paint brush applies contours and character. The duality of the technique, producing abstraction or specific detail, expresses Ms. Kress' meaning, that we often let styled objects convey our significance, whereas, our human selves might be disconnected from the projection.

In these three works from her show, Ms. Kress accurately represents what passes for discourse in the human present. Dialogue and ideas are irrelevant since all the backstory we really need can be expressed by a mere gesture, some style choices, and upscale props. What matters in the human experience is dressing well and being seen in the right places. The switch permitting interaction and communion is plainly in the "off" position.

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Bonnie Mettler: "How Can There Be Any Sin in Sincere?"

During March, Muse Gallery hosted a show by the conspicuously talented Bonnie Mettler with two things going for it that are rare indeed in the smaller Philadelphia venues that feature less well known artists. She has superb skills with the paintbrush, and the content of her art is thematically challenging. One usually sees either painters whose topic is paint itself or deep thinkers with no regard for what technique signifies, so the combination of both of these in Mettler's show was a treat, indeed. I am going to point out one or two niggling distractions amid the joyous display of artistry, but no one should get the impression I didn't enjoy myself at this show. In fact, I think everyone should buy a Mettler so the show never ends.

Mettler's brushwork reminds me of Cezanne. Everyone's brushwork, let's face it, would be better if it reminded us of Cezanne's, the use of complimentary colors to build dimension, eschewing tricks of perspective. To look closely at a single application of the paint in one spot is to actually feel the brush squeeze against the canvas to shed its load.

The compositions here are delightfully ambitious, not only because of the discipline required to indicate dimension and form exclusively with the contrast between light and dark pigment, but also because Ms. Mettler wants to distinguish between objects in the present and those that are ghosts from the relative past. Consider the rendition of a field of flowers with feet and toes hidden in the topsoil like Rocky and Bullwinkle in those confusing, early 60s, cartoon bumpers. In her notes for the show, Mettler says she played in a field of yellow petals as a girl child in Virginia and never understood it was once part of a slave-keeping plantation or that would-be escapees had their toes cut off there to hobble future attempts to run away. The presentation of foreground, better lighting and distinction between shapes, and background, darker in mist and available light, is superb. Again, the brushwork is about the best you can find, quite ambitious, and makes one go nose-to-canvas to sort out how it was constructed.

I have seen Bonnnie Mettler's portraiture before, but nothing so worthy of her splendid technique as the piece depicting Trayvon Martin as a beautiful adolescent wearing a hoodie. Because she is able to render the optimism of youth, its naivety and rambunctiousness, the portrait is immensely moving and the quotation immensely sad: "..a white man murdered him with impunity"; also, the phrase "58 years, no change," my entire life, dating back to the Montgomery bus boycott. Ms. Mettler is able to articulate with the deft application of color the race prejudice Trayvon's murder represents, a teenager, eyebrow cocked, ready for fun, wearing his hoodie, who could only be deemed a threat in an absurd Floridian culture that elevates the myth of a man's home being an inviolate castle over the myths of justice, equality, and the innocence of the young. We are the stories we tell.

As they used to say on What's My Line?, here's where I "Flip over all the cards," and unburden myself of my reservations about Bonnie Mettler's show, called My Racial Ignorance. I am an absolute bear when it comes to the urban legend, if you will, about parallel races of man, fighting it out for domination, trying to get their own, history-celebrating month, Citizens Park Blank Night, or excuse for bad manners. I simply don't recognize the so-called race difference between people whose skin is dark or not. No scientific evidence exists to credibly support the calumny of multiple races of humans exploiting nature on this planet, no more than science recognizes a species difference between a German shepherd and a Chihuahua. Excuse me, if they can breed, they're the same species, okay? Call this my racial ignorance if you will, but I refuse to wear the unnecessary baggage tag of "White," or accept membership in a group that other people demand I acknowledge as mines.

Ms. Mettler's show is a sincere lament over the ugly truth that huge segments of our democratic population have never heard of Emmet Till, his murder on account of the color of his skin by a damned, ignorant lynch mob, who kidnapped him in front of his own son because someone thought Emmett whistled at a white woman. Every American ought to know this story, because such knowledge is essential to prevent further acts of violent stupidity in the name of race. But I refute the notion that Bonnie Mettler ought to be shamed by the cruelty of persons whom she is not, because she is a member of their distinct species. Incidentally, when I read the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., I applaud the eloquence and fellow-feeling of which mankind is capable despite an individual being tortured by the simple-mindedness of others. 50 years after the death of that visionary, brilliant human writer, we still have politicians in this country who exploit the myth of racial difference by using phrases like "inner-city laziness" to describe the causes of a weak job market, and "Obamacare" to tarnish the lofty ideal that human health is sacred and ought to be universally protected by human society.

Bonnie Mettler is a jewel among painters and a fine person. I wish she could have packaged her brilliant paintings in less shabby sentiments.

"Ralph Roether Expands Perspective in New Work"      published in ArtVoices Magazine, Winter 2015-16

The disposable nature of ideology and popular culture inhibits a reviewer of a work of art from appealing to universal rules when assessing its style or content. Our world isn’t monolithic; we piece it together collaboratively. One could blather, “I don’t like it,” and that’s okay, now we know how you feel, but we’re back on square one: a reality that makes sense only relatively speaking. Alternately, we have reason to be fascinated by the means of expression the artist chooses and the influences that shaped the contents of their thought: trapped in our own bleak subjectivity, evidence that other minds exist and struggle to find and communicate their experience as we do is encouraging.

The recent work of Ralph Roether extends his usage of a cartoon style and explains how he got there, while adding a broader range of interest to the sex-obsessed content in his last wave of pictures. In correspondence with Artvoices, he cites R. Crumb, Ralph Bakshi, and John Kricfalusi as cartoonists whose work influences his own. The blatant eroticism in his Sexmerica series is reminiscent of the ribald subjects in Crumb and Bakshi, but his deft blending of provocative advertising-type copy (“gunlovintits” and “theAmericanfearofboobs”) with jiggly images uses those overripe breasts and bullet-like nipples to present an opinion not gorged with testosterone: America embraces gun culture but represses sexuality.

Roether warrants the influence on his paintings of Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi, whose hilarious animation of a dog and cat living together had an infantile pre-sexuality about them and a second-grader’s fascination with scatology. Roether’s Seahorsecock began as ink on paper and was converted digitally and colorized in Adobe Illustrator. Professing that the finished result comes from a technology-reliant process recalls the production studio where television cartoons are made. The art producer deconstructs biological entities into dislocated parts, bloodshot eyeballs, balloon-like breasts, and mindless penises. Kricfalusi’s work had the same post-rational metonymies writhing in an Apocalyptic background, with advertising and the sit-com form as its enervated setting. Who can forget, “It’s Log, it’s Log! It’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood!”? Roether communicates the same Ren and Stimpy feeling that commercial slogans have replaced what previous generations accepted as real.

No exterior point of reference helps us to negotiate the world of commercial excesses clamoring for our attention or the billions of souls hoping to survive the final cut on American Idol. In a Nature that can only be understood subjectively, one last comfort is finding out the history that led to some other human sharing our space and sidling up to the trough. Roether rates Salvador Dali as an artist he admires, but it hardly seems relevant to his work that Dali could melt watches or grow hair on a rock. The big, waxed mustache paired an academic mastery of oil paint with an intensely idiosyncratic vocabulary of forms. Skip the Freudian analysis. That giant hand certainly “represents” masturbation, but it’s Dali’s audacity in claiming space in the gallery for his feverishly personal vision that commands our attention.

Roether’s work relies for style on the graphic art of advertising and illustration, embracing commercial methods while expressing his highly individual obsessions, with pro wrestling, with typography, or with generous breasts. Experience throws new people arbitrarily into our individual consciousness on a daily basis. So much as the ceaseless accidents of existence make us anxious, taking the effort to map out how that artist or schoolyard shooter got that way re-establishes a sense of control. Roether’s self-portraits or portraits of children utilize an abstracted likeness, rendered with a cartoonish refinement of the crucial details plus a multi-layered white noise of random numbers and particular fonts.

Recognizing that Picasso and Jasper Johns used lettering as a subject reassures us that, yes by golly, Roether’s work, though it’s the damnedest thing, all those nekkid ladies and such, comes from a very long lineage. Setting such comforts aside, a thing about numerals and typography is that the individual signs, divorced from a larger context, lack correspondence to complete sentences. Be that as it may, every font communicates a mood that comes from the history of its use. Even when not used to fully form ideas they contain meaning. Roether’s use of numbers and letters as part of the composition refers to the endless, shrill pitch of advertising and how the deluge of claims on our attention, that incessant, hissing backdrop, eventually strips the signs from the products they represent.

The details about the physical means by which the images are produced are important. We long to see the process that leads from the man to the picture. His recent Blue Portrait series, self-portraits, and portraits of buxom Jenny Roether are painted on hollow-core doors. It’s a cheap material and one that might be salvaged in bulk from a home-remodeling site. Like Toulouse-Lautrec’s oils on cardboard, the thriftiness and accessibility of the surface matters, but the non-absorbency of the surface recommends it for the artist’s style of colorization and the ease with which transparency is achieved.

Roether writes that the documentary Crumb “opened my eyes to a whole other art world. [It] had a huge influence on me.” Terry Zwigoff’s film pleased many of us, perhaps because of Crumb’s candor about his own peculiar sexual obsessions and openness about the influence of his comic book-loving older brother, a fine artist who was mentally unfit to put his work before the public. Best of all, the movie has no less a critic than Robert Hughes to tell us that satirical cartoons exposing society’s underbelly are more than worthy of claims to high art. We benefit by recognizing that the over-the-top sensibilities of the satirist, looking in instead of out for some of his most extreme characterizations, have their origins in advertisements, pop culture, and between the matches at Wrestlemania.

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