Rich color and seductive sculptures

BOBBIE ALLEN

It seems hard to believe that something as basic to painting as the

use of color could be a controversial subject in art history. For a

short period of time in Europe, a group of painters rejected the

postimpressionist palette -- the soft, translucent shades of green

and blue used by Monet and others -- in favor of bold and rich

expressions of pure complimentary combinations. These painters --

among them Derain and Matisse -- were called Les fauves, the wild

beasts, because of the rough and simplified forms they painted. Add

the influence of Gauguin, and you have the movement known as fauvism.

They changed the way many artists looked at color, and along with

it came a change in application of the paint, and in the composition.

They favored heavy, dark lines and simple objects. There was no

pretense to paint subjects with true-to-life colors: a tree might be

blue as well as green, skin might be purple or orange. Compositions

were flat, without shadow, and this in turn influenced yet another

-ism: Russian primitivism, the context that produced Chagall.

Two locally exhibited artists have inherited this influence:

painter William DeBilzan and sculptor Louis Longi. Both are on view

at Diane DeBilzan Gallery, 224 Forest Ave. DeBilzan’s work shares the

primitivist palette and love of heavy outline. They all feature

elongated, stick-like figures: solitary, in pairs, family groups, or

crowds, standing in the foreground. They face us, placed in front of

square white houses on streets lined with balloon-like trees. It is a

kind of “American Gothic” with the colors of tropical Gauguin, and

each is framed in found planks of rough wood, some still slotted and

hinged from its former role in furniture.

The effect is rather like a satire. “Waiting” (41x46, mixed media)

features 10 identically-dressed figures, each in denim-blue pants and

T-shirt-white tops, standing in the rough angles of relaxed boredom.

Their skin is metallic copper. Their forms are heavily outlined in

deep, glazed black. The background is a solid, vivid red, applied

thickly with flat knife strokes. The bottom has a black checkerboard

pattern airbrushed across the base of the canvas, a top coat that

runs across their feet.

The overall effect is vaguely ironic: If “Waiting for Godot” had

10 characters, this might be a rendering of a scene.

It is the exaggerated simplicity of the composition that gives

these figures that effect, the sense of color and composition so

bright and naive that there is something wry about it, a slanted

smile.

The American street that DeBilzan depicts often toys with the

cliche. White box houses with narrow brown doors to fit the narrow

people, and yellow green lawns with, yes, white picket fences.

“Association” (42x41, mixed media) features four figures with

slanted heads that gaze at the ground. DeBilzan’s figures are all so

long and thin that the placement of limbs and heads are easy to

interpolate. Purple and blue roofs slant over a cadmium yellow

ground. A torn square of canvas hangs with rough edges, tacked to the

canvas, with scraps of paper over that. The alphabet is stenciled

along the bottom. It is a rough association, suggestive of the basic

relationships we either endure or enjoy, each according to our lot.

For this reason I found “The Shape I’m In” (29x26, mixed media)

particularly interesting. Here, the copper color of skin has become

the ground, painted over metal screens, burlap and corrugated

cardboard brushed in blue. The single figure is isolated and

distinct, a hung over specimen in vibrant shades.

But simply walk around the corner and this figure will step off

the canvas into three dimensions. DeBilzan also sculpts, and “Self

Portrait” is a larger-than-life rendering of his own painted figure.

It stands 86 inches, mounted on a weathered wood base, dressed in

that denim blue, white T-shirt, with copper face, glaze running down

the surface formed in plaster, wire, string and re-bar.

Louis Longi’s bronzes share the same basic rendering of the human

form. But there is something seductive about the fractured, stiffly

dancing bodies that Longi presents. “Seated Woman” (22, bronze) rests

on a roughly cut alabaster block. Her head is merely a suggestion.

The limbs are airy, in spite of the material. She is disturbingly

uneasy in her sitting position, as if she is about to get up. Her

limbs are mere tubes, but the sense of restlessness is apparent in

them.

Compare this with DeBilzan’s “Justified” that stands on an antique

and highly weathered Mexican wood pedestal. She wears red, white and

blue, highly glazed. The canvas that forms her body is wrapped around

a scrap of wood. She is woman most basic, dressed in simple clothes,

with a simple, sad demeanor. She seems heavy, complex, and

immoveable, in spite of the fact that the materials DeBilzan uses are

much lighter than bronze.

Longi’s “At That Moment” (26) is a dancer, bent backward in an

impossible angle, standing lightly on alabaster. She is an example of

how complex simplicity can be. Longi’s method of opening up the

solidity of his figures allows you to see through the bronze, a

figure in metal that light can pass through.

The easiest way for viewers to dismiss these kinds of pure, simple

interpretations is with the knee-jerk “I could do that”

dismissiveness so often overheard in galleries. Of course, they

couldn’t; and of course, they didn’t. Such simplicities contain

subtle complexity for those who wish to see it, something that

demands the viewer’s thought and empathy. Matisse said, “I don’t

paint things. I only paint the difference between things.” That is

the nature of simplicity.

* BOBBIE ALLEN is a poet and writer who has taught art theory and

criticism. She currently teaches writing at the University of

California, Irvine.