Lynn Geesaman
River North is positively abloom: there are flower paintings at three galleries, and flowers are prominent at two more. As any Redon lover knows, flower paintings can be gloriously intense, but those at Belloc Lowndes and Sonia Zaks don’t seem to go much beyond pretty colors, producing the most superficial of responses and eschewing real beauty.
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The light colors and airy spaces of Monticiano, Italy, 2000 recall impressionist paintings (which Geesaman loved at the Cleveland Museum of Art as a child). Richly detailed, this seductive image shows many tiny leaves in a variety of sizes and pale greens whose delicacy is in sharp contrast to the solidity of a boulder off to the right. Bagatelle, Paris, France, 1995 shows a stunning patch of flowers under gnarly trees that seem at once sheltering and threatening. The flower patch, set off by some yellow blooms behind it, is blended into the lawn–it’s as if the dark green grass had suddenly turned violet. Geesaman’s softening technique produces a strange mix of effects: textured when the branches are thick, a bit fuzzy when they’re thin. Reflecting on her medium, Geesaman is just as interested in displaying a range of representational possibilities as she is in depicting trees.
Each horse is based on one or more photos, some of which Piccillo takes himself; he strips away the riders, the backgrounds, the saddles, and sometimes the bridles. By setting the horses against plain black backgrounds, he focuses attention on his (justifiably praised) draftsmanship: the subtle balance he creates between whites and grays brings every inch to life. The leaping horse in E-105 (1999) is seen in profile, crowding the frame, but again Piccillo never reduces the creature to a single burst of motion. The horse’s veins point in a variety of directions, the tail has two different curves, and part of the mane stands straight up. Though E-105 recalls Edweard Muybridge’s famous series on animal locomotion, its diverse textures provide the kind of complexity impossible in a Muybridge photograph.
