Tom Paiement’s “Tribal Feud 4” at Greenhut Galleries. Courtesy of Tom Paiement
Three Portland shows with totally different points of view form an eclectic, tripartite group of pleasures.
You’ll have to act quickly to see “Tom Paiement: Poetry & Perversions” at Greenhut Galleries (through June 29), but your haste will be rewarded with the best show this artist has had in recent memory. The other two, both at Cove Street Arts, are up for another month, but shouldn’t be missed — “Gravité” is the first Portland show for Canadian-born painter Louis-Pierre Lachapelle (through July 20), and “Sean Kernan: Missing Pictures” (through July 27) showcases a Connecticut photographer whose connections to the Maine Media Workshops in Rockport run long and deep.
BEAUTY AND BARBARISM
Tom Paiement is a restless creative energy, leaning toward regularly turning out whole new bodies of work rather than lingering too long in one thematic. This is laudable. But there is strength in mixing things up, as this show reveals. “Poetry & Perversions” combines distinctly different strands of his work to make a point: That humanity has a capacity for wisdom, kindness and intelligence at the same time that it can be breathtakingly cruel, violent and primitive.
In the first camp are Paiement’s floral still life works, and his beautiful and beloved landscapes – such as “Poetry in Green,” “Wildflowers” and “Garden Forms” – which extol the abundant miracles of nature. Among the floral still lifes, a particularly intriguing pairing is “Spot of Red,” a mixed media on paper, and “Flowers in Transition.” The former is primarily a pencil sketch with a couple dabs of red, while the latter is the exact same arrangement, but painted in with a brilliant palette of greens, reds, purples and golds.
It is fascinating to see two works executed in different ways, giving each a unique character despite their similar underlying structure. And it is edifying to behold both the strength of Paiement’s line – one of his most enduring signatures – as well as the way he builds his images. Rounding out the “poetry” end of the title are a self-portrait, two interiors and “Poetry in Full,” a painting of an infant swathed in a blanket and fast asleep.
“Perversions” manifest in a group of truly startling – and startlingly violent – wrestling paintings. In the window of Greenhut is “Feud.” A face anchors the bottom half of the painting, while a hand comes from behind, grabs the face’s nostrils and yanks the head back, forcing the mouth open in a harrowing roar of pain. A quartet of “Tribal Feud” paintings inside (numbered “1” through “4”) show naked wrestlers locked in agonizing, contorted poses as they roll around, lift each other into the air and slam each other down onto the hard floor. In three of these paintings, the figures on the floor spurt blood from their head or mouth.
Tom Paiement’s “Boy Who Loves Horses” at Greenhut Galleries. Courtesy of Tom Paiement
Less physically violent are “Boy Who Loves Horses” and “Luncheon.” It will take you a minute to perceive the profound sadness and righteous anger of these paintings. In both, a near horizon line separates vastly different worlds. “Boy” displays a young disadvantaged pre-adolescent in a green field looking longingly beyond a length of actual barbed wire to the horses of the title.
“Luncheon” depicts a white family of eight around a picnic table that also sits in a green field. Beyond we discern migrant workers bending over during some sort of harvest. Though these two pieces are not as brutal or sadistic as the “Feud” paintings, they are no less emotionally violent in their depictions of privilege versus poverty, inclusion versus exclusion, comfort and ease versus pain and toil. In their understatement, they are as loud as a scream.
Louis-Pierre Lachapelle’s “23” at Cove Street Arts. Courtesy of Erin Little
ACTS OF CREATION
The paintings of Louis-Pierre Lachapelle are visceral, raw and explosive. They can evoke phenomena as intimately corporeal as splotches of blood (“02”) or the sense of reeling and whirling we feel equally when watching a spinning breakdancer or contemplating a world on the brink of extinction (“09”). They can feel terrestrial, as if we are staring into the fiery caldera of a volcano (“23”) or watching a chasm split the earth open during an earthquake (“12”). And they can bring to mind cosmic spectacles such as nebulae, supernovas and the Big Bang (“08,” “06,” “18”).
Lachapelle’s paintings might even remind us of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” in the Sistine Chapel (“20”), though this same work – one of the best in the show – can just as easily feel like a desperate reaching to escape the chaos of our fractious era and the sense of our imminent annihilation. So much energy emanates from these canvases that viewing all 20 is almost disorienting. Buckle up for a bumpy, yet enthralling, ride.
These evocations would be enough, of course, on their own in terms of content. But what is mind-boggling about Lachapelle’s work is that these allusions are merely the most apparent layer of what comprises an astonishing complexity of techniques and concepts. Lachapelle can bring together a stunning array of media in a single canvas. He spatters paint onto them, mixes in inks and water. He puddles, stains and pours, manipulating the canvas to create drips and runs of paint. He draws, daubs on thick impastos, and layers in photo transfers of hoodies, sneakers and sports jerseys taken by his frequent collaborator, Erin Little.
Like a mad chemist creating fuming, bubbling solutions in a laboratory, Lachapelle experiments with wild combinations of media. Take any one canvas and stare at it long enough, and the frenzy of its creation becomes palpable. They can feel dangerously combustible, right on the knife edge of complete, devastating destruction or implosion.
This is not simply about materiality, though there is plenty of that: hard encrustations of paint, vaporous metallic shimmers, taffy-like streaks scraped across a canvas, the translucence of thinly diluted pigments spreading outward as they soak into the surface, and on and on. The paintings are also about time and history; Lachapelle wants us to see every step of his process through the preserving of layer upon layer of experimentation.
He hides nothing, which creates its own brand of rawness, as if he is ripping his chest open to expose his soul. This intense nakedness can make his paintings feel almost shockingly vulnerable, prompting us to want to look away from the emotional flaying on display. This is powerful painting well worth experiencing in full, and it’s unlike anything we are used to seeing in Maine.
Sean Kernan’s “Blue Room, Sunlight” at Cove Street Arts. Courtesy of Sean Kernan
PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY
You might need a respite of calm after Lachapelle’s exhibit. Fortunately, it is just steps away at Bruce Brown’s curated show of works by photographer Sean Kernan. With a keen sense of time-faded memories and melancholy, Kernan has shot his grandfather’s house in New York’s Hudson Valley in winter.
Kernan’s statement for the show includes a quote from the great Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “(The house) has been broken into pieces inside me; a room here, a room there, and then a piece of a hallway that doesn’t connect these two rooms, but is preserved as a fragment, by itself. In this way, it is all dispersed inside me.”
It is a perfect description of what transpires on the walls of this gallery. Kernan is interested in the way the breeze blows a curtain, the way beams of light enter a window or illuminate a tattered flag from behind, the way dust hangs in that light like mist, or its pale glow on a wall of peeling paint. He brings a kind of incarnation to memory, the feeling of books and furniture and rooms that have been touched and used. But where once there might have been merriment and activity, we now find bottomless depths of silence.
The incarnation of memory also has a lot to do with Kernan’s feel for textures: the worn planks of the attic floor, peeling paint or a wall papered in toile, the glint of a mirror, the felt of a hat sitting on the leather upholstery of a chair, and so on.
Sean Kernan’s “Bedroom Ghost” at Cove Street Arts Courtesy of Sean Kernan
Spirits are here, too, most tangibly in a photo titled “Bedroom Ghost,” where we see the shadow of a figure on the door and the dusty imprint of a hand above the doorknob. Or in a pair of boots, where we are prodded to imagine the legs and feet of the person who filled their hollowness the way the boot trees now do. We ask “Who might have knelt on the prie-dieu by the window in the attic? Or we connect the little boy in “Sailor Suit” with the “Rocking Horse” in that same attic. And what is the eerie supernatural light illuminating the face of “Portrait of a Lady,” or the ghostly aura around the head of the girl in “First Communion Dress”?
Of course, viewers will not know this house through direct experience. So, we must use our own imagination to connect the vignettes of rooms Kernan presents. We find ourselves engaging a kind of cryptaesthesia to divine a floor plan and the flow of spaces. What is upstairs or downstairs? Is the blue room next to the parlor or across the hall from it?
Kernan also includes romantic compositions such as a “Plumb Bob” suspended over a book, an open book in mottled sunlight, or a room with a window that sheds light on an impossibly sized tome almost as tall as the ceiling. In these pictures, memories seem to have fused together as if in the surreality of dreams, odd Hitchcockian images softened by a quality of wistfulness and longing.
Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com.
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