Sculpture adds sense to the Natural World:

All God's Children Got Rhythm
Yoshitomo Saito
New Work
June 4- July 31, 2010

They are less than two inches high; just pieces of branch buds, assembled on the wall and poking out at you from your knees to over your head. And they cast beautifully intricate shadows. You can get lost in looking at them. They are "Rocky Mountain Winter" by Yoshitomo Saito, and are installed this month and next at Rule Gallery, 227 Broadway, Denver.

I stood at the opening with the titles list, reading to see if I could match each sculpture with its title. I had to look hard and think in order to make the matches but soon became obvious. I asked the guy next to me to do the same. He make the same matches. I guess Saito knows what he's talking about. His subject most often is nature.

Not in the sappy way that landscape paintings can be, these sculptures are pleasant to look at and inform us about how it is to see things in nature. Things we don't often think to see.

Looking for the Face I had before the world was made
by Terry Talty
January 30, 2010

DENVER, COLORADO - Representing the human face in art is a little like saying aloud who you're sleeping with. You're telling people what you find attractive. When you paint faces, you're showing what you think is human. Painters have more trouble with it today because representing a particular face accurately puts that painting into a sub-genre of art: photorealism, portraiture, realism. Many contemporary artists use a cartoon, a symbol, or some other kind of messy mark or gesture to depict the meta-face, or the every-face. Michaël Borremans blur some, and focuses well on the nondescript parts struggling to find another way to that universal face.

The show called Looking for the face I had before the world was made is six-different exhibitions by six artists (or artist teams) that opened Jan. 29 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Borremans' paintings, about 10, are in the main floor gallery.

The gallery is dimly lit and the faces in the paintings aren't engaging the viewer. They are the backs of heads, someone looking away, the profile of an artist intent on something oblique to us. The colors are somber and in one, the subject is a thorny stick leaning against the wall. In one, the figure is wearing a tightish cap that seems to have mouse ears sewn onto it. No one would be caught dead in such a hat unless it was a costume, said my friend nudging me.

The universal face is on the other side of that hat, looking into the picture frame with us. Inside another frame is a brown haired female looking down at her hands. No facial features stand out. In the dim gallery light in front of this canvas, two figures are standing looking at the canvas in profile. One brown-haired female looks like the painting; I take her picture on my crummy phone camera. The other human is a guy with too much apparent individuality to be the universal. One side of his head is shaved and the other -- well, I can only see a dark line of hair at the crown from my vantage point but it seems to be a normal head of hair.

Try to draw this threesome as the universal. The guy can pose showing his left or right side and play the part of twice as many characters. Eliminate all until you get the 'common human.' I let Photoshop help me. Put this face in a scene that we all do: look at our hands, scratch an itch or turn away from someone looking at us. 

The primordial human face -- one to whom we can all relate -- is cold and sad like the feeling in this gallery. We are not inside this human. We are looking at it. It's a completely different feeling than the Renaissance window to the world, different from looking into a picture and buying the illusion that it's a window onto a painted scene painted. And there is one painting in this show that has this traditional perspective just to remind us that looking at the face that is not engaging us, is different from looking through the window with the artist. It's subject is simply an open magazine. It's there, the traditional window to the world, where we are in the mind, behind the face, of the universal person looking at the open pages.

I don't know what you have when you finally create the meta-face, if Borremans has done it here. You don't have the feeling 'hey, we're all looking at the same stuff. I can really feel I'm seeing with that figure's eyes.'

It's more the question, 'hey, is that what I look like to the world?'

And if he's found the face that we had before the world was made ... 'have I always looked like that?'

Looking for the Face I had before the world was made
by Terry Talty
January 29, 2010

DENVER, COLORADO - Disembodied lips enunciated clearly the plight of the speaker feeling disconnected from the world and her physical body. The brain ... and the brain ... the lips say, and emphasize with the few poignant pauses. This 14-minutes monologue is so fast you originally believe it's in a foreign language.

The language is that of Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright who gave us Waiting for Godot and many other surrealistic plays and stories. The lips are a 2 foot by 1 foot video projection made before the playwright died in 1989, and it is installed in a completely black room at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. The background of the face or anything else that would be on the screen is black. The projected lips are a deep value of black, the mouth less deep and the teeth white, and moving as fast as the lips.

Of course this image is intriguing. Is it the face I had before the world was made? as the title of this six-part exhibition at the MCA is called? 

Before The World Was Made

If I make the lashes dark
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet,
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.

What if I look upon a man
As though on my beloved,
And my blood be cold the while
And my heart unmoved?
Why should he think me cruel
Or that he is betrayed?
I'd have him love the thing that was
Before the world was made.

Beckett's film piece is called Not I. The speaker continually talks about the the person who is physically moving about: looking at something in a museum, grocery shopping, typing as the Not I, not the person that the speaker feels she is. She doesn't recognize her physical self. She sighs, she screams a little, she emotes and is rational. This may sound like too much to take for 14 minutes, but the speech is as open as an astrology column. The lips for words, words make thoughts, spoken thoughts lead to created thoughts, thoughts trigger emotions, emotions fire sensations, create more thoughts and on and on.

Out of the blue, a friend of mine said to me a while ago, "I don't want to die. I really like thinking."

Is this experience in a dark room with disembodied lips what I was before the world was made? And is that different from the one that will be mine after my world is gone?

Looking for the Face I had before the world was made
by Terry Talty
January 30, 2010

DENVER, COLORADO - Portraits of people by A.G. Rizzoli at the Museum of Contemporary Art are a cross between a building dedication plaque and Dadaist drawings of machines or geometry that were titled with someone's name. Each of Rizzoli's elaborate mechanical drawings of the classic sky scraper is named for someone - his mother, a Mr. Alfredo Capobianco (full title of the piece: Alfredo Capobianco and Family Symbolically Sketched/Palazzo del Capobianco).

These aren't tiny images but ever viewer steps within inches of the frame to get more intimate with the details of Mr. Capobiano's resurrection as a drawing of a building. There are slogans in banners and around the architecture that is the central element of each piece that give us some tiny hint at who these people are, but it's not obvious why one building is Mr. Capobiano and another is the artist's mother. And it becomes unimportant. I go back again and again to look up close at one of the drawings and pick out something interesting to take in. The next time I look I pick out something different. These drawing are like those Edible Bouquets. This time I took a honeydew melon slice. Last time I just had time to grab a grape. I'm not sure if I have time to tackle a whole slice of pineapple on a stick.

What kind of building would you be? A woman looking with me at this very detailed drawings of fantasy architecture described a house she'd imagined when she was a kid: nine stories below ground and nine stories above, made out of malleable foam.

Me? I had a dream when I was a kid that I live in a house made of a tight circle of pine trees with a floor about ten feet up. A treehouse, but no walls but pine trees, no windows but the small slits between them, and a clear view to the stars. With some invisible ceiling.

And you?