Exploring the unreality of everyday reality

BOBBIE ALLEN

What is a metaphor? The pedigree of the word itself is pure ancient

Greek, and its roots reveal the complexity taken for granted behind

its concept: meta means “change,” and pherin means “to bear.” A

metaphor is an idea that changes meaning by bearing the weight of

another idea in comparison.

A metaphor is a magical thing. It provokes new meaning by evoking

implicit relationships.

So difficult to explain but so simple on the surface, especially

when we’re talking about visual metaphors, the realm of art. Its

tendrils reach out to other literary concepts, like symbol, allegory,

simile. Artists can imply new meaning by summoning up a visual

vocabulary for the viewer and packing it into the image.

This can occur on many levels. Tyler Stallings uses a photographic

realism to provoke opposing meanings: the unreality in our reality

(on view at Peter Blake Gallery, 326 N. Coast Highway through April

22). Stallings’ small canvases in his portrait series could be

mistaken for photographs, if the people portrayed in them did not

have exaggerated features: huge eyes, like pop cartoons from the

1970s, and gigantic mouths. They are based on glossy magazine photos,

images that are manipulated into simian distortions, with faces like

Reses monkeys.

“Filtering” (oil on panel on canvas) portrays a white-hot blond

smiling at us, one eye covered by her glowing hair in a red-striped

blouse, provocatively unbuttoned. In another world, she would be

all-American sexy and inviting; but Stallings evokes a different

meaning.

Her huge, single blue eye seems feral and hungry, like a cyclops.

She is a slave to us, frantic and desperate, even cannibalistic. In

her, we see ourselves, the result of a bottomless hunger for perfect

beauty and youth.

Stallings is true to the color and lighting of his original, but

his complex method of presenting that truth results in a

fictionalized image that violently forces more meaning from the

subject.

“Adaptation” (oil on panel on canvas) shows a young man in a

bright green sweater with a parrot on his shoulder. But the man’s

grotesque eyes and teeth contrast sharply with the small-eyed bird.

The similar greens in the sweater and the feathers invite

comparison. The parrot seems puzzled by the man’s frenzied grin, and

seems wise and reserved by comparison. Who is the mimic here, the

parrot or the man?

These are single-shot metaphors. They are shocking and

disconcerting, like a flashbulb in the eyes, brilliantly executed in

an instant of perception.

The work of Timothy Berry is the very antithesis of this method.

Berry’s canvases are packed with layers of metaphor and symbolism,

objects of study and contemplation so complex they defy verbal

description (on view at Greenwood Chebithes Gallery, 330 N. Coast

Highway, through May 1). They represent what poet William Butler

Yeats called, “the fascination of what’s difficult.”

“Portmanteau Pi Cabinet” (oil, encaustic, graphite and toner on

canvas and paper) is indeed difficult. Even the title is a double and

triple entendre: a portmanteau is a large suitcase, or a word that

has multiple meanings by combining forms. The “cabinet” refers to a

17th century practice of filling a room with eccentric collectible

objects, or of using intarsia to simulate such a room. “Pi” is the

infinite number and a Greek letter at the same time.

This is what I call a “step back, step forward” canvas. From a

distance, it has all the chaos of Hieronymus Bosch (a late Gothic

painter who excelled in brightly-colored depictions of monsters).

Berry’s complex technique gives the surface a wide variety of

textures: some places look like engraving work, some areas like

fabric, some like panel, some like translucent vellum.

There is no vanishing point to anchor perception; but simply put:

the word “peace” tales up the vertical left of the canvas, and

various figures and forms swirl around the rest, executed in faded

jewel tones, the colors of tapestry.

This is where you step forward. A demon with an exaggerated penis

and a winged figure with a lifted palm oppose each other in two

egg-shaped areas of encaustic. They are contraries, evoking Blake and

Yeats, evoking Picasso’s idea of the perfect form.

A violet-colored urn (the feminine form) at the bottom of the

canvas bears a Latin motto imposed over the face of a clown. Its

various meanings call to mind the composers Monteverdi and Gorecki

(among others: “Beatus Vir” is based on the Psalms), Virgil, and

Bozo.

The word “peace” is formed of Rorschach-like letters done in a

beautiful peacock blue, and you can find winged skeletons and demon

faces in their shapes. Even a small red globe floating in the mix

contains the word “more” pressed into the surface.

This should all amount to chaos on the canvas, but Berry balances

it all, harmonizing with his color palette, suspending our disbelief

with his complexity.

How much do you need to know to understand such difficulty?

Everything and nothing. Like James Joyce’s novel “Finnegans Wake”

(generally recognized as the most difficult novel in English, loaded

with portmanteaus of Joyce’s devising), Berry draws on universal

ideas and dream-like associations. His multilayered canvases extract

multilayered meanings that reverberate in the viewer with dreamy

resonance.

Joyce famously said that a child could understand his book if he

read it out loud. Berry’s canvases rely on a certain childlike

playfulness, the willingness to stare and interact with it in wonder

and openness, to rely on instinct and intellect both at once.

“What then is the truth?” asked Nietzsche, “A moveable host of

metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms.”

Art attempting to grasp the truth will always reach for figurative

visual language, a fiction to say what’s real.

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

criticism. She teaches writing at UC Irvine.