The New York Optimist
October 2008
Chelsea Gallery Crawl, October 16, 2008

by
Stephan Fowlkes
Wow!  What a great night to be in Chelsea.  With over 20 openings, we were
treated to a dazzling array of work spanning the gamut in both style and
technique: figurative and abstract sculpture, landscape, abstract and cosmic
painting, surreal photography, just to mention a few.

Upon entering the Witzenhausen Gallery which just opened in September, we
were confronted with a group of children, life-size, meticulously crafted, with a
cartoonish Japanime feel to them.  Very cute, until upon further inspection a
very dark side reveals itself: “an African American girl in a cute T-shirt beholds
the spectator with a pure and unprejudiced look in her eyes.  She proudly reveals
the object she has just found, hidden in the dust at her feet: a shiny golden
diamond ring.  She seems unfazed by the fact that it is still attached to a hacked-
off human finger, a fact that tells us something about the backdrop of this
situation: a war zone.”  The innocence of these children is juxtaposed with their
far more sinister situations, yet these stylized caricatures make light of their
nightmarish realities and maintain their endearing appeal, the purity and
innocence of childhood, potential and the promise of a brighter future.






Playground
Harma Heikens at Witzenhausen Gallery
547 W. 27th Street, 5th Floor
October 16-November 15, 2008
And to soothe any agitation caused by Heiken’s haunting figures, we found ourselves surrounded by April Gornik’s dramatic, large-scale landscapes, mostly out
of Africa: dunes in Namibia, the Serengeti.  These large oils on canvas are as much about the light as the landscapes themselves, with dramatic storm clouds,
and late-day lingering light.  These works are a departure for Gornik, whose signature style is largely of land- and sea-scapes from the Hamptons and Sag
Harbor.  For her Africa paintings, her palette is remarkably rich and warm, with glimpses of sunlight, even in the storm paintings, or in the sunsets leaving the
dunes in an intense, soft light and shadow.  The paintings such as Red Desert “function as eternal mirages of the open African plane--its solitude, enormity,
omniscience, and the intrinsic serenity associated with distant lands untouched.  It is in this painted space of intimate immensity where dueling weather
systems, terrain and sky, and the flooding light and growing shadows collide.”  Gornik’s paintings have an uncanny ability to capture the mood of a place, and
these works are no exception, drawing me into the sense of insignificance when faced with the awesome  and imposing beauty of such severe and seductive
landscapes.

April Gornik at Danese
535 W. 24th Street
October 16-November 15, 2008
Schedule
But the main event and highlight of the evening had to be Thierry W Despont’s Through the Moon Door  at Marlborough Chelsea.  This wasn’t just a collection
of sculptures and paintings, it was an atmospheric and sensory experience--a huge leap from reality.  Under subdued lighting with a backdrop of black walls,
Despont’s massive, luminescent, and textural multi-media paintings of celestial orbs and nebulas--themselves rising out of black backgrounds, even mounted in
heavy black frames--seem suspended in the void of space.  This all sets the stage for the sculpture: assemblages constructed out of objects found and collected
from the industrial era: “old workshop tools, fragments of machinery and farming equipment....These are fossils, bits and pieces left behind--relics of an
industrial civilization.”  With, calipers, wrenches, scythes, tractor seats, two-man pull saw blades, block and tackle, springs and gears, plow tines and the like,
Despont constructs other-worldly creatures, insects, masks.  These are displayed in a very “scientific” fashion, as specimens, encased in glass, or within
antique display cases or enclosed within a steel cage.  These insects and creatures very well may have come from these planets in the paintings, and here they
have been catalogued and presented for our scrutiny, as would be an exhibit of curiosities or artifacts in a museum.  The sheer volume of these assemblages,
the vast quantity of found and collected objects to construct them shows the years invested into this work, all made over the past decade.  It is like an antique
science-fiction, on the one hand appreciating the beauty of these old objects and tools, and on the other entertaining the vivid and focused imagination and
precision that has combined them to create these creatures.  What’s more amazing is that all this work comes out of his “spare” time, as “Despont is one of the
busiest and most sought-after residential architects in the world today,” with clients such as Bill Gates and Calvin Klein, the J. Paul Getty Museum inL.A. and
the Centennial Restoration of the Statue of Liberty, for which he was the Associate Architect.  Not bad for multi-tasking.  And they say jack of all trades,
master of none.  In this case, they’re dead wrong.  This is exactly the kind of experience I wish was more prevalent in Chelsea: a cohesive product of passion,
technique and vision exquisitely presented and accessible yet provocative and challenging.

Through the Moon Door
Thierry W Despont at Marlborough Chelsea
545 W. 25th Street
October 16-November 8, 2008
When you can have your cake
and eat it too, why not top it
off with a cherry?  To end the
evening, we ended up with a
delicious sampling of Joel-
Peter Witkin’s photographs
and preparatory drawings at
Bruce Silverstein.   Here the
artist’s vision leads us down
an equally well developed
imaginary universe, but far
more surreal and of a far
darker realm.  
Often remarkably disturbing, these elaborately conceived and executed images take us down a rabbit hole into the dark, twisted caverns of the artist’s
imagination.  Each staged scene is meticulously composed, as can be seen in the sketches then beautifully captured and presented as gelatin silver prints, and
several color digital C-prints.  Knowing relatively little about photographic technique, I was uncertain if there was digital manipulation or other more traditional
processes involved in the development of these works, but the results are haunting, disturbing, elaborate, with an overwhelming attention to every last detail in
the compositions.  Nothing is left to chance, and what is presented is profoundly psychological, verging on the nightmarish.  “We shall never be privy to the
inner depths of Witkin’s unconscious mind, but as we can see from our own dramatic response to his works, there exists a powerful approach to life’s most
riveting themes: beauty and death.”  

Ingredients: 1 part Man Ray for style and imagination, 1 part Mapplethorpe for anatomical props, and 1 part Bosch for fantastical morbidity and the
grotesque.  Mix well.  Presto!  Instant Witkin.  Enjoy!

Poetic Realism
Joel-Peter Witkin at Bruce Silverstein
535 W. 24th Street
October 15-November 15, 2008
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Resident Art Writer, Stephan Fowlkes, takes you on a weekly art crawl in Manhattan. Updated weekly, click here for my archived crawls