Unnatural Habitats Tim Callaghan @ William Busta Our earliest memories are also usually the simplest: something happened, something memorably nice or not-so-nice, while the sky was a certain color, or a certain sound, or a smell, or a taste was running through it. The senses coagulate around a singular event in all their bright specificity, like brilliant smears of paint. It’s only much later that a storyline emerges, imposing the interlocking grid of plot and significance, making sense of an experience/image that was originally about as orderly as hair caught in a drain. Tim Callaghan’s paintings attempt to be simple in this way, not wasting paint or undue draughtmanship in works that are conflations of brushstroke, form, and deliberately cursory depiction. Like many other ambitious painters of the past century (Francis Bacon was an especially expressive and articulate example), Callaghan seeks to use painting as a tool to escape from the mental drudgery of routine perception. His paintings at William Busta’s gallery combine brushy sketches of real things with passages that resemble abstract paintings, as if trying to close the gap between them. Many of Callaghan’s titles reflect a taste for literature and music as well, emphasizing the synaesthetic nature of perception. Mark Twain (2007) for instance shows us a scene in a downtown-type artist’s studio. Toward the center a pile of stretchers teeters unsteadily next to a table fan and jars of acrylic paint, while a blank piece of paper curls high up on a square support column. Plastic sheeting subsides along a line of sunlit windows in the background. There’s nothing too Huckleberry Fin n about any of that, while a friendly, contemporary American feel to the composition and pastel coloring push it toward ‘toon-iness. It could almost be a painting by Dana Schutz, Callaghan’s classmate at the Cleveland Institute of Art in the late 1990’s. But the determined absence of the human figure sets it apart, plus an almost contemptuous disregard for the real presence of paint. But the title here is a clue, and like Samuel Clemens’ pen name it means several things, including “notice that there are two.” On closer examination, Mark Twain falls apart here and there, devolving into steaks and blotches of pure color, like a Sonia Delauney painting from the 1920’s, or like the nearly abstract small landscape journeys of contemporary artist David Dupuis.. It’s also a little like a glimpse of underlying code in director Andy Wachowski’s 1999 film The Matrix. Callaghan’s paintings are steeped in art history and popular culture, to such an extent that their overt claim to simplicity is really just another footnote. The great American painter of the 1950’s Fairfield Porter is probably the grandfather of these works, but the uninflected flatness that Callaghan aspires to also owes something to Alex Katz’ portraits and landscapes. And it seems important that Callaghan stops before his depiction gets too flat, probably because on the way back to perceptual freshness he stirs the embers of an old quarrel between the illusionistic intentions of painting and theoretical notions of abstraction as a less agenda-driven activity. But Callaghan is a peaceable artist and even as he revisits that old struggle, sparks hardly fly He seems to consciously avoid drama at all costs in order to maintain a state of painterly reverie, where substitutions, elisions, and informal concatenations float on a hard-to-define scrim of mood. One of the least narrative, least emotional, most nearly abstract paintings in the current show is The Idiot Son (2006). Again like Dana Schutz, and like another well-known classmate, Craig Kucia, Callaghan sometimes likes to paint piles of things. Maybe for all of them it’s a trope for the painting of stuff in general, for the mere accumulation of marks and paint – literally a whatever statement. Callaghan’s pile in The Idiot Son is placed at the right margin of the canvas; it looks about the size of a haystack and is especially indistinct, just at the threshold of not being a picture of a pile at all. Still, it does appear to be composed of logs, and in a gray semi-circle of shadow at its base the painter has sketched a couple of stumps. Bisecting the pictorial space vertically from the bottom of the canvas, something like a board rises, then stops in the middle and is stuck at right angles to another board, heading on out of the canvas to the left. That’s it. You can almost hear the painting muttering to itself, So what?.. The title could mean something about futility or the destruction of the environment, or not. The whole thing is the equivalent of a shrug. Yet despite all the evident ennui there is a surprising amount of calm visual pleasure in works like The Idiot Son, and my own personal favorite, Perspective Denizon (2007). Most of Callaghan’s subjects appear to be daytime visions, but in that work a bright sphere of white light flashes against a distinctly nocturnal gray and black background. The three-point perspective referred to in the title culminates in what may be a streetlight seen from below, surrounded by a fish-bowl horizon of clumpy buildings, stumpy tree branches, and a splash of dark gray-black clouds. Near the center and close to some prickly pine needles, a reddish orb hovers. It looks enough like something to not be just a mistake, a blotch; but what is it? Probably this is the painting’s “denizon,” and what more can you say? Most of Callaghan’s paintings seem to be made as temporary shelters for any ragged, belated feeling or perception that might stagger past: habitats for whatever truth can evade the “truthiness” of custom and usage. William Busta has long been committed to showing the most adventurous and ambitious art that northern Ohio has to offer. His new gallery on Prospect Avenue is off to a very solid start. Tim Callaghan’s work is up-to-the-minute contemporary painting by any standard, and it’s exciting that this is the artist’s first solo show. An exhibit of other recent and long-term Busta artists in the smaller front gallery is also convincingly strong. Matthew Kolodziej’s large painting Effervescence, recently on view at Oberlin’s FAVA Gallery (Free Times 3/21/07) hangs in the front, surrounded by smaller works from some of the region’s best artists: Eva Kwong, Don Harvey, Hildur Johnsson, and Christi Burchfield. [Free Times 4/25/07]] |
