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By
Robert W. Duffy Cultural News Editor of the Post-Dispatch
A VIEWER scrambles around vainly trying to find the right word to
describe the work of Guy Chase, which went up the other day at the Forum
for Contemporary Art. Mystical presents itself for consideration, and that
description feels right for a moment, but—as if they were words suspended
in liquid, like those old Eight Ball fortune-telling toys—up roils
cerebral
or intellectual, uncompromisingly so. Brilliant,
moving, challenging, enigmatic, satisfying, funnyall come and go.
But in fact—and this is part of
the enormous appeal of this workno single word or sentiment adequately describes
this work.
Although you can say that about a lot
of things, especially where art is concerned, the synthetic and quicksilver
quality of this work, the fact that all sorts of ideas and feelings, observations
and emotions are drawn into it and radiate from it—is exactly what
elevates it to its position
of superiority. It is like whiteness, which is a conspiracy of all colors.
It is like light itself, in which all the rays of the spectrum, in concert,
produce that ineffable but lifegiving, revelatory quality that everyone
knows but only artists, poets and saints genuinely comprehend and absorb.
Chase
understands.
Influences as diverse as Evangelical
Christianity and the original Disneyland are pressed into his consciousness,
along with Courbet and painting by number, the sacraments and Coca-Cola,
the Middle Ages and Mondrian and minimalism.
Like most great artists, he knows that
what is absent or invisible or edited out of a work of art is as important
structurally, visually and narratively as what is left in.
This understanding is presented eloquently
in the first work that surrounds you in this exhibition.
This group of large paintings, some
created in the spirit of trompe lÕoeil, hang in a gallery that is
in the front of the building, which faces north. Most all of the day, rain
or shine, the gallery receives generous natural light through its big windows.
This abundance of light is ironic because the paintings are all about movie
screens, which customarily come alive in darkness.
The scale of these screens is that of
movie screens you may have in the attic, left over from Super 8 days, or
the kind that you may remember from classrooms onto which movies and slides
were projected. Those of us who did time in art history lectures have a
special relationship with silver screens of this particular scale.
The movie-screen shape (and metaphor)
is a constant in these paintings, but the working of their surfaces is varied.
One, for example, suggests with collage an idea that Chase |
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considers:
What remains, like some sort of
metaphysical dusting or residue, of images that have been flashed on the
screen. To suggest this mystery, he has fixed images of medieval art to
the screen and painted over them.
Other workings of surface images make
you think of what might have happened had Kasimir Malevich hung around long
enough to collaborate on paintings with Gerhard Richter in an expressionist
mood. In all the pictures, there is a bringing together of formal concerns
with the stirrings of the soul. All the marriages are different; all are
eminently successful.
The most recent work can be loosely
described as painting, although the medium actually is the aluminum soft
drink can, cut in two and flattened, arranged in various patterns and ÒpaintedÓ
subtly with soda pop or fruit juice. Once again, because of the reflecting
surfaces, the play of light is extremely important to the considerable impact
of these small works of art.
In the time between the screens and
the aluminum can pictures, Chase produced work that illuminates various
aspects of this extraordinary painterÕs intelligence and curiosity.
For example, there is the rigorous intellectualism
of his legal pad paintings. By completing or perverting or performing variations
on pictures in paint-by-number kits, Chase reveals not only a sense of humor
but also a mature, sophisticated mischievousness: an awareness of how fascinating
and rewarding and creative and invigorating it is to break the rules.
Everywhere
there is evidence of the collision of a muscular intellect with powerful
spirituality: the work of a painter who, under the sway of an idiosyncratic
theology, is a priest as well.
The exhibition was organized by Forum
curator Mel Watkin.
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