Laugh out loud: Sara DiDonato’s Burst.

The Surreal Life
By Pam Barrett-Fender

Extended Realities
Arts Center Gallery at the Saratoga County Arts Council, through Feb. 28

At first glance, Extended Realities seemed like an overly generic and sweeping title for the current exhibit at the Arts Center Gallery in Saratoga. But after due consideration, the commonality of three disparate voices began to crystalize, and it began to seem as apt a title as any. The painters represented in this exhibit, each in her/his own way, have portrayed a physical manipulation of form, figure and images, a personalized expression of the complexity of human drama. Sara DiDonato, Andrea Hersch and Michael Fenton, in their respective work, aim not to alter a unified reality, but to extend the notion of various intricate coexisting realities.

Sara DiDonato’s nine paintings and drawings each portray a single figure (all girls and women,) involved in what seems to be a moment of unself-conscious personal discovery. The composition varies between pieces, ranging from closely cropped head shots to drawings of the entire body, surrounded by ample but undefined space. The scale of the work also covers a broad range, including intimate panels less than 12 inches, as well as those over four feet.

Roughly half of her subjects are depicted in various states of contortion—twisted, bent, folded into extreme and precarious positions. (DiDonato attributes this aspect of her visual vocabulary to her mother’s career as a contortionist in an Italian circus.) While the powerful effect of this imagery cannot be overlooked, the narrative in her work actually takes place in the subtle and complex facial expressions. This is where the artist captures the simultaneous contrasting emotions that define her characters’ experience. This is where the viewer glimpses the internal life of the figures (and the artist) as they explore places that exist between categories, places not necessarily mapped by their intellect.

DiDonato’s figures are rendered relatively tightly, but not without gesture in her marks.

Her palette is a saturated local color, leaning toward rich blues. They read like intimate portraits, focusing on character over description, experience over definition.

The 12 variously scaled paintings and drawings by Andrea Hersch suggest, in her own language, an essentially uncertain human condition. While not strictly figurative, these forms (including long liquid drops, fleshy split or nippled lobes, viscous globules, rubbery cloudlike formations, and ornamental ruffles reminiscent of clothing) generate very close associations with the human body. Her surreal anthropomorphic forms are presented in various situations that imply danger, impending destruction. Her crisply designed and smoothly painted organlike structures are precariously balanced, pulled, stretched, wrapped, poked, and otherwise acted upon by a whole host of forces. The human stand-ins react to these forces by bulging, dripping, falling, and threatening to tear apart, explode, or snap.

The fear and the pain in the images are palpable, and yet there is a levity to them that makes them bearable, even fun, to look at. Her rich, playfully funky palette (pink, pumpkin, ochre, and jade in one painting, for example) and her clean, bubbly definition lend to the whimsy that draws you into the inevitable peril.

Michael Fenton is the painter of the three whose images are most complex and detailed, and whose narratives are most literal. Fenton presents seven mid-sized paintings, each hanging with the weight of a story. All but two pieces relate specifically to religious parables from the Pentateuch, serving as a moral critique of contemporary culture. His images are compiled digitally, and then painted by hand. This lends itself to multiple image overlays and fractious surfaces, appropriately illustrating the inevitably tragic tales of avarice, idolatry, betrayal and condemnation.

The strongest of Fenton’s painting, however, is also the most lyrical and impulsive of the images. It is a scene from a balcony in New York, looking out toward a neat vertical row of other balconies, each containing its own tiny separate drama. Pigeons fly between the buildings, partially blocking the view, and claiming sole omniscience.

Unfortunately, this piece is hung not in the main gallery space, but in a hallway outside the gallery, inches above a case of jewelry, its only light a glaring red exit sign. Otherwise, the exhibit was thoughtfully curated and presented, with a title that makes sense after all.

	Send A Letter to Our Editor
	Back Home