Waiting for Meaning, but in No Rush To Find It
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Charles Garabedian’s paintings, which depict surreal scenarios in a raw style reminiscent of art brut, have a way of garnering reluctant praise. Commended for their originality, they are also often criticized for their negligent modeling. Nevertheless, in his second show at Betty Cuningham Gallery, the 83-year-old California-based painter seems as disinclined as ever to impress the viewer with sophisticated technique. His naïve rendering of dolllike female nudes is neither cunning, nor quaint; it’s simply efficacious for his strange and sometimes opaque narratives.
These eight paintings, however, linger in the mind. Mr. Garabedian clearly believes in the epic, and also in the power of traditional painting to evoke it. Disconcertingly, he pursues certain traditional values of painting while jettisoning their every peripheral comfort.
The artist’s vocabulary of clunky objects — airplanes, trucks, a Greek temple, unidentifiable knickknacks — fill the nearly 23-foot-long acrylic painting “Air Raid” (2006) with chaotic portent. Why a chopped-down tree near a flame-spewing factory? Literal meanings are left dangling, yet all hums with pictorial purpose. Despite his clumsy modeling, Mr. Garabedian is an adroit and forceful composer. Blotchy beiges and vacant blues establish, over the painting’s entire breadth, the weight of mounding earth beneath open sky. Darting, acid-yellow airplanes dot the air like angry bees, while at one edge a battleship menaces as an inert intrusion of cerulean blue — to the extent, that is, that any ship sporting a giant bowling pin can threaten.
As an illustration, the image is merely manic, but as a painting, its powerful orchestration of forms lends it an acerbic gravity, even as its style almost defies us to take it seriously. Who would give a second thought to toylike objects, painted on a sheet of paper push-pinned to a wall?
Other paintings feature female nudes, and all of them feel truly naked. Mostly paleskinned and awkwardly posed, they stare with blank, patient expressions. Some are armless; a number bend their necks at impossible angles. Even so, in a work like “Mythological Figure” (2005), one senses the artist’s empathy for his subject, surpassed by only an urge to meet the demands of painting. With a quirkily honest eye, he makes palpable the vulnerability of the woman who faces us, elbows wide and fingertips joined in an indecipherable pose. Green nail polish adorns the fingers of one hand, while the genitals are left undecorated by hair. Overpainted contours, visible up close, show how hard the artist reworked the arms to get their final position.
By contrast, the armless, prone, and nearly featureless figure in “Africa” (2006) is dark skinned. In this 13-footlong painting, the artist again convincingly locates forms, this time setting tawny earth tones beneath the dense glimmer of green-blue sea and a pinkish sky. The great, unwinding mass of the figure is bracketed effectively by two much smaller ones; the first stands, a pillar of tart blue, while the second, seated one is a curl of livid pink. The feet of the dark figure nestle up against a tiny Greek temple, while a pale globe (a fishbowl?) lies in the foreground. Like Bonnard, the artist seems to have dreamed his way to a climactic resolution, though with an utterly un-French gaucheness of technique.
The irregularly shaped “Rex’s Sweetheart” (2005) features four rounded tabs at the top — perfect for pinning the work to the wall, it turns out, though two of the projections could also be ears or horns on the standing female nude, whose rather rubbery limbs end in the most delicate turns of hand and feet. Nearby, two large watercolors are painted on several joined, standard-size sheets of paper. One of them, “Adam and Eve” (2005), depicts the two familiar characters in a sketchy landscape with overturned chairs and a sports trophy. These images, too, have a peculiar gravitas of rhythm, even though their materials seem improvisational, and their hanging commensurately ad hoc.
Most haunting of all is “Channel Swimmer” (2006), which depicts a woman’s body curled motionless underwater, eyes open, a stream of bubbles emerging from her nostrils. Colors give the scene a resonant dimensionality, vividly conveying the body’s illumination in a twilight zone under greenish-black water. From one side, the tip of a boat approaches — or is it departing? The woman’s fate is left dangling, as if Mr. Garabedian were entrusting the meaning of the scene to a higher power, possibly the “collective unconsciousness” he discusses with interviewer Kristine McKenna in the exhibition catalog. One imagines that, having performed the artist’s duty of constructing a scenario, he shares with the viewer its mysterious possibilities instead of wrapping it in insinuations.
Of course, Mr. Garabedian’s romantic faith in the transcendent manifests itself in the most unsentimental of styles. His memorable paintings seem to be a soulful defiance of both a critic’s categories and an academician’s techniques. They have the mordant tenderness of an artist who can’t shake the anxieties of the nuclear age, yet chooses to disregard its “-isms.”
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