In art chat, realism and abstraction are often treated as if they came from alien planets with nothing in common except perhaps some paint. Art in three Minneapolis gallery shows suggests there are more similarities in these categories than tradition suggests.
Public Functionary
With their blossoming shapes, fine-line matrices and veils of color, the "Meridian" paintings of Liza Sylvestre look like textbook abstractions. They have no horizon lines to suggest landscapes, no faces or body parts to signal portraits, no crisp geometry to hint at architecture or the built environment. They don't represent anything obvious, and yet their amorphously abstract designs suggest things. Ever eager to make sense of what we see, our minds link her inchoate designs to real-world stuff.
Inked and painted on polished white panels, Sylvestre's multilayered images seem to twist and undulate as if they represent leaves and stems of seaweed stirred by ocean currents. They bloom into blood-red pools or stains of coffee brown and lapis lazuli blue. Jagged filaments of opalescent white streaming from the depths resemble jellyfish tendrils. Fine lines — in red, black, blue — twist and turn, suggesting roots, vines, ropes, knots. The images seems to flow from her pen like random doodles but are, at the same time, obsessively controlled. Her thin pigments puddle, stain and bleed together, but never turn to muck.
Typically her paintings are rectangular and a bit more than 3 feet tall. Others are narrow and irregularly shaped, with rounded cloudlike edges. Everywhere her luminous, evanescent images suggest many things but represent nothing.
A Minneapolis native and graduate of the University of Minnesota, Sylvestre, 32, spent a half-dozen years in Miami, where she launched her career before returning to the Twin Cities a couple of years ago. Perhaps her immersion in Florida's tropical landscape inspired her oceanic abstractions. Or maybe they just sprang from experiments with paint. Though pretty enough to be dismissed as mere eye candy, her paintings have just enough guts to compel attention.
4-8 p.m. Tue., noon-4 p.m. Wed., noon-8 p.m. Fri., 7-11 p.m. Sat. Ends Jan. 9. Free. 1400 12th Av. NE., Mpls. Enter through the loading dock on Buchanan Street. 612-238-9523 or publicfunctionary.org.
Groveland Gallery
Landscapes are the broad theme uniting the four artists whose works on paper are featured in Groveland's main gallery, but many of the 28 images hover right on the edge of abstraction even when they depict something specific.
Take Robert Dorlac's Icelandic watercolors. Even their titles are cryptically abstract. Each is the letter "S" followed by a number as in "S5," or "S16." The S stands for Siglufjordur, a fjord and town on the north coast of Iceland where Dorlac spent a month as artist-in-residence during 2013.
