Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 11, 1990 TAG: 9003081684
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ann Weinstein
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The organic figure-shapes are not quite human, not quite animal and not quite decipherable. They alternate among figure, limb and mummy, and lie on the ground of the image more in death than at rest. Not necessarily subject to gravity, they appear to float in undetermined space - or sort of: The weight of cast shadows pin them to the field beneath them.
Duval's use of different materials is not arbitrary. The small images in the studied process of lithography are the most centered, the most even in strokes, balanced in value and, therefore, the most analytical.
Her charcoals have a luminous quality. They change values in a swirling maelstrom of strokes to suggest a change in time and elements, from light to dark and from air to ocean. The figures seem doomed to be forever subject to endless currents.
The raised strokes in the acrylic paintings trap the massively modeled figures in a web of thorns or barbed wire. Deep shadows are not just dark areas, but aggregate marks that ensnare them relentlessly. The actual (as opposed to painted) textures in the paintings convey the authority and weight of material reality.
The trussed figures, earth-bound but struggling to emerge, seem to embody the strength of major forces in contention. But the struggle takes place in great silence and detachment.
In several of the paintings the endless tension between life and death is exactly balanced. Perfect, if asymmetrical, balance usually implies resolution, and therefore serenity. In this case, the endless lack of resolution results in eternal frustration.
The titles of the works, "Ingwer" and "Gember," mean ginger root in Belgian and German. Knowing this helps to explain the work, but also to demystify it.
The show runs through March 23. The duPont Gallery at Washington and Lee, Lexington, is open weekdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Sculpture show
The joint sculpture show at Roanoke and Virginia Western Community Colleges is something else. To get the full impact of the bold, varied work by Virginia Commonwealth University graduate students, it is necessary to visit both galleries.
In "Juneblue," Jeff Williams cleanly constructs a life-size, cartoon version of a ramshackle mountain shack. The tin roof is made of draped, fixed and painted cloth.
The grain of raw wood is painted and applied to the flat surface of plywood walls. Two animal skulls, attached to one side, cast the long (though painted) shadows of late afternoon. Hanging from one end, which is painted with a luminous morning light, a ubiquitous but outsized metal porch chair is constructed of wood and painted with age.
Attached to the other end, a brightly lit lamp throws the wall above it into painted deep-night blackness and the wall below into painted blinding white, object-dissolving light.
On the dark, far side of the house, the beautiful twinkling glow of rotating fireflies.
This sculpture separates the casual from the interested viewer - which is to say, it rewards involved scrutiny. Its narrative quality provides its most immediate impact, but its beautiful effects of light are its most abiding. The light is tender, dark, dense, raking, translucent. And for the most part, it is painted and implied rather than actual.
Like Kafka's "Metamorphosis," "Nose Dive from Grace" by Carolyn Henne is both funny and harrowing. Its open, intricate construction combines wood with metals and grids with tortured figurative allusions.
Humanly scaled, Jenifer Johnson's wood construction "Where I Went to Collect My Thoughts" alludes to inside, outside and passage. The structural supports joining its walls, gates and sills are visual components and its surfaces are brightly, darkly and broadly painted, with a sense of human gesture.
The figure in "Days Gone By," by David Klaren, resembles a character in a Gary Trudeau cartoon. Of necessity, it is oddly built up from back to front, in terraced layers, textures and rhythms of laminated cardboard - like a topographical map in 3-D. Not readily discernible, the portrait lends an extra dimension to the work. But it also distracts from its abstract, tactile qualities.
Mo Neal's drawing, "No Way Out" and her sculpture, "Escape/Fail: Trap" are related in theme (by title) and color (black and white), but not in form or style.
Although nothing in nature is black and white, they are the colors natural to drawing, and appear to be so in the protest drawing "No Way Out." But their abstract quality is stressed in the flatly painted sculpture, in which the natural swirling phenomena of whirlpool or typhoon open up to schematic geometric forms in wood and metal.
Obviously, "Part of a Brief Sequence," by Andrew Harper, is an open-ended series. Hung low on wires, crudely shaped outsized jockey shorts are made with common but unorthodox materials and set in plaster to hold their irregular, misshapen forms.
About 200 feet in diameter, Jeff Rumaner's outdoor sculpture of mylar-covered panels form a spiral, a universal form denoting motion. Angled to catch the reflection of the sky, its surfaces contain constant change and movement: blue, gray, mottled clouds and the glint of sun.
Although its forms and materials are vaguely reminiscent of Donald Judd's minimalist boxes, Vincent Buwalda's constructed relief, "Current" is slightly eccentric and, in a formal way, slightly narrative. He's left the patina of time on the skin of one of its shallow alumninim rectangles and a flat aluminum band is subjectively painted blue.
"Fish in Landscape," Steve Ebben's sculpture of found, assembled and painted wood and metal pieces, seems strangely isolated. It needs a family of similar forms with which to interact. His painting, "Journey of a Mackerel" doesn't clarify the situation.
The shows run through March 30. Olin Hall Gallery, Roanoke College, is open Tuesday through Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m. Virginia Western, 3095 Colonial Ave. S.W., is open Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m.; Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Monday through Thursday from 6 to 9 p.m.
by CNB