Artists conversing in their work has a rich history: consider Picasso and Braque in the heady days of analytical cubism. David X. Levine and Antonio Adriano Puleo do not quite reach those airy heights in Combatants and Correspondents, their two-person show at Dust Gallery, but they do provide engaging evidence that artistic conversation still thrives.
In several pairings of drawings and mixed-media works, Levine and Puleo have a back-and-forth with biomorphic forms and abstract arrangements. What Levine draws in simple configurations, Puleo counters with paint and collage, and vice versa.
Though their approaches differ, they share an affinity of purpose and a vocabulary of forms, and sometimes you find yourself confused as to which artist's work you're viewing. A leaf-life form runs through Puleo's work, and Levine pulls it out of his kit bag for "Adriano Loved by Everyone," adding a vigilant eye to the top.
The conversation runs a course through the gallery if you follow the pairings along the counterclockwise path prescribed by the list of works. Levine's "Weezer Arlene" and Puleo's "Stop Messing Around" open the discussion, with the latter upending the former's wiggly green-and-red figure, turning what looks like a hotdog in Levine's drawing into a cap of gold leaf. The dialogue continues, in deliberate diptychs and separate works, until Levine's "You're Not Gone Until I Let You Go" extends a drawn arm and hand from a swatch of floral-stitched fabric that seem to wave at Puleo's "Safety Matching."
The paired pieces are only a portion of the show, which affords sufficient opportunity to examine each artist in isolation. Levine's drawings tend a bit toward the precious, as if his vague forms would take life as Peter Max figures. But the best are taut and merely suggestive. His mandala-like compositions, comprising concentric circles, end in outer rings with tantalizing gaps, wrinkles in the apparent cosmic order. Other works respond to music, as in the tangle of red and black lines of "Ginger Baker." Puleo's busy collage paintings can get a little frenzied, particularly in smaller works. In larger format, Puleo's work soars, as in the aptly titled "There is Dignity and Power in the Rightness of Size," with its huge, stylized blue jay balanced by collaged prints of smaller birds.
Painter Marty Walsh, known for her portraits of everyday objects, has assembled a show comprising works by artists who also make use of the everyday. Allegorical Amalgamations unites four distinct visions under this rubric at the Reed Whipple Cultural Center Gallery.
Suzanne Mitchell uses found objects, collage and dried organic matter to create fantastical cloaks and capes, such as "Café Carga," in which kelp, tree pods and photos depend from a horse collar. Jacque Parsley gathers smaller, inorganic materials—the refuse of play and commerce—into shrines and mini-monuments, for instance, capping a bowling-trophy figure with a doll's head atop a bangled shoe-form in "Big Foot."
Meanwhile, Wendi Smith and Tom Pfannerstill counterpoint Mitchell and Smith by painting what the other pair arranges. Smith paints the organic world in suspended "Skywheels," and in tall columns marking the seasons, while Pfannerstill painstakingly reproduces refuse in painted relief sculptures. Where Smith's "Vernal Equinox," "Autumnal Equinox" and "Summer Solstice" organize molted feathers and harvested corn into architectural elements, Pfannerstill's paintings dignify the disposed. That he goes to such lengths to reproduce crushed emblems of lapsed marketing campaigns and reminder notes ("Potatoes" scrawled across a notebook page) reminds us of the tremendous effort invested in throw-away culture, and that we often soil a largely unnoticed world around us.
Chuck Twardy has written for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years. His website,
www.members.cox.net/theanteroom, has a forum.