Szabolcs Veres at Spencer Brownstone

Remember back when I wrote about the abundance of up-and-coming Romanian painters? In an addendum to the post, I mentioned Szabolcs Veres, another painter from Romania whose work appeals to my twisted sense of beauty and whose name baffles my sense of pronunciation. Anyway, last night, I clicked the wrong bookmark in the browser menu and was taken to Veres's page at the Spencer Brownstone Gallery website. Out of curiosity, I checked the site to see what the current show was - it was Szabolcs Veres, and it was coming down in two days. Needless to say, the following afternoon I was off to SoHo to check it out.

The SoHo gallery scene is pretty much dead now. The vast majority of SoHo galleries are photography galleries, which can be interesting, but when I take an afternoon to visit galleries I prefer to have some variety. Deitch Projects is there, along with the Drawing Center, but most of the other big names have moved to Chelsea by now. Spencer Brownstone is another SoHoldout - it's a decent gallery that shows a variety of (mostly) European artists. The show at Spencer Brownstone is Veres's first American solo show, and his first show in the US in general.

So after waiting fifteen minutes for the subway for no good reason, I finally made it to SoHo and to the gallery. My first impression of the show was: "these paintings look much bigger in person." I had only previously seen Veres's work on the web, and the sense of scale was totally lost in digitization. Because most of his work is portraiture, I expected the paintings to be life-size, kind of like Francis Bacon's triptychs. These paintings were far larger than I had expected - each was about a meter-and-a-half tall.

One thing that seems to be a hallmark of contemporary Romanian painting (or, at least, Ghenie and Veres) is the bold use of contrast. Ghenie's high contrast darks give his paintings the look of colored black-and-white film stills (which is where much of his imagery originates). In Veres's work, shadows are integrated into the forms, intertwined with flesh and matter. This is most prominent in the deeply set eyes in his portraits.

Based on his loose brushwork and seemingly manic paint application, some would argue that Veres is an expressionistic painter. However, I would argue differently - I see his work as using the language of expressionism as a means to reach unrelated ends. To me, Veres's paintings, particularly the large-scale portraits, are finely balanced on the thin line between beauty and horror. The paintings are very beautiful and have a strange allure to them, but the deformity caused by the artist's hand removes them from the realm of "traditional" beauty. I see his use of abstraction as a tool to maintain the balance between beauty and horror, not as the result of any metaphysical "self-expression." Beauty is subjective, of course, but I find the greatest beauty in imperfection - I'd rather look at an image of someone unique rather than at Playboy's flavor-of-the-month models.

One more thing to add - after seeing the show I took a look at the gallery's price list and I was dumbfounded - they're practically giving these paintings away! Most of them are under $6000, and a few are about twice that, but nowhere near the prices I had expected - my estimate was around 15k for the "smaller" pieces, and a bit more for the larger ones. I could have taken one of them home with me, but I just paid off my credit card and I don't want to put it near the maximum again. Also, the paintings look best from about fifteen feet away, and I don't think there's a spot in my apartment where you can get that far back without stepping into the hallway. Still, I can imagine seeing another show of his work in a few years and beating myself up because his work is going for ten times what it is now.

Romanian Painters: Coincidence?

I'm not sure why, but lately I've been seeing Adrian Ghenie's work everywhere. Not "opium-and-shrooms-at-the-same-time-get-kicked-out-of-college-for-hallucinating-about-your-stat-teacher" everywhere - I'm talking about the major art magazines. The most recent Flash Art has a Ghenie piece on the cover and an interview inside. The most recent Artforum has an ad for a Ghenie show at Mihai Nicodim in LA (Maybe my little sister, who lives in LA, would be interested in seeing the show and reporting back about it. Hint, hint, kiddo.). And I remember seeing several more references to him in the half-dozen or so magazines I read each month, but I have so many goddamn magazines in my apartment and studio that trying to find one particular review would be a full-time job.

At any rate, you could say that I dream of Ghenie. It's no surprise - in his work, I see many things I'd like my own work to be. His paintings maintain a delicate balance of order and chaos - everything seems rational even though it's been scraped with a trowel and repainted a dozen times. His color palette frequently switches between monochrome and vibrant and it works either way. At least on a formal level, I look at Ghenie's work with envy.

One series of paintings, "The Collector," shows the infamous Nazi looter Hermann Goering looking at his collection of stolen artwork. Another series is called "Pie Fight" and depicts serious-looking suited men throwing pies at each other (like the famous deleted ending from Dr. Strangelove). Other uplifting themes in Ghenie's oeuvre include Lenin's corpse, wolves coming out of the darkness, and seemingly silent scenes of interiors cloaked in shadows. Also, roadside executions.

Ghenie's work also ties in nicely to an exhibition I saw last night. I had been in Chelsea working with a friend on some changes to his website, and once we were done I decided, since it was Thursday, to try and score some free wine at gallery openings. I peeked in a few galleries but didn't see anything amazing until, on 25th street, something caught my eye - a cat.

A brief aside: my little sister, who lives out in LA, loves cats. A lot. Like, way more than most people. She and her fiancee have two of them, and her neighbors (who are practically part of the family) have six. Anyway, here in Williamsburg, there are a lot of cats. Most convenience stores have at least one on the payroll as a mousetrap. Recently, I started taking pictures for her of all the neighborhood cats that I could track down. I saw the cat in Chelsea as an extension of this little project, so I went into the building to snap a few pictures of the little guy.

The little bastard who started it all...

After I had finished photographing the cat, I looked up and noticed some wine bottles on a table down the hall. Finally, an actual opening reception! I followed the smell of cheap wine to a small gallery, called "Slag", hidden in a back hallway. The gallery was, indeed, having an opening for a group show that had just gone up that day. It just so happens that one of the four artists in the show is, like Ghenie, also Romanian.

I don't want to make hasty assumptions, but if these two are any indication, then damn, there's some good art coming out of Romania these days!

The Romanian artist in the group show "Realm" at Slag Gallery is named Sergiu Toma. One wall of the gallery was devoted to his work. Like his countryman Ghenie, Toma's work is mainly monochromatic with touches of color. The childlike figures look like they were taken from old photographs, but the faces are all blurred or otherwise distorted, like curse victims in The Ring. The nostalgic colors and subjects coupled with the fuzzy rendering brought to mind themes of forgetfulness - forgetting the faces of lost friends from long ago. One large painting, called "Time Machine," had a boy peering into a strange green machine that appeared to be a combination water cooler/drill press. Like the other paintings, the coloration was bleak, save for the viridian green machine. A smaller version, without the boy, was also in the show. I know there have been many times in my life when I wish I had a time machine, or at least the ability to go into a coma at will to sleep through stressful situations.

The forgetfulness that accompanies the endless march of time... and the fact that there are many situations in our lives we would like to forget. Given some of the settings in which Toma placed his characters, I imagine there are things they would like to forget as well.

UPDATE 1/27: Here's another excellent Romanian painter I found. I'm seeing Romanian painters everywhere... someone call Health Services, I think I just saw Szabolcs Veres on my toast!