Arnold Mesches
By Fred Camper
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Visitors to Mesches’s Los Angeles studio used to call him “a New York painter,” he says, but there’s an oddly European feel to The Gate, informed by Mesches’s first memory of death: a child at the bottom center is dwarfed by three adult figures, a hearse, and an ornate entranceway. The scene is covered with snow, which outlines the tree branches; together the lines of the branches, the gate, and the hearse form an almost impenetrable network, a world the child cannot hope to understand.
This exhibit is part of a much larger touring show–over 100 works–that will be presented in April at the Castellani Art Museum in Niagara Falls, New York. Mesches, whose work is usually informed by history, has had a long involvement with leftist politics that began with his participation in a late-40s Hollywood strike, when he was working as a storyboard painter. And historian Howard Zinn, one of the catalog essayists, puts Mesches’s work in the context of the last half century’s political upheavals. But most of the works on view here focus less on class struggle than on the way the stuff of the world impinges on consciousness.
Green Hills I shows a girl in profile looking upward. The ornate pattern on her dress is painted with the precision of an early-15th-century master, and her face has the suppleness and porcelainlike inscrutability of a painted saint. A strangely regular cloud pattern covers the sky, and the circular opening in the clouds that admits the sun’s beams looks almost surreal. The girl’s relationship to the abstracted landscape of green hills that surrounds her is also a little peculiar. While it’s true that the perspective in early-15th-century painting is often off, here the figure is so much bigger than the land she stands on that she seems a giant. These odd variations on an older style create disparities that can’t be easily resolved. Though early Renaissance figures are often somewhere between icons and flesh-and-blood humans, Palubinskas’s girl is strangely anonymous and removed. And while bare, often symbolic landscapes are common in 15th-century Italian painting, Palubinskas pushes sparseness to an almost modern extreme.
