In its tireless celebration of its centennial, the City of Las Vegas has devoted its galleries to shows by local artists. Artists from Left of Center Gallery are featured at the City Hall Bridge Gallery, for instance, and several other group shows are in the works. For the moment, though, the spotlight lingers on two talented artists of regional repute.
Merrilee Hortt's Drawings and Paintings, through March 27 at the Reed Whipple Cultural Center, comprises a selection of relatively recent work by the painter and collagist; while painter Susanne Forestieri's Moving Pictures occupies the Charleston Heights Arts Center Gallery through March 13.
The centerpiece of Hortt's show is a suite of nine paintings that ape—and the verb is not chosen loosely—Old Master portraits, with the key distinction that their subjects are animals. For comparison's sake, each small oil is paired with a minuscule reproduction of its antecedent. For instance, Antonello de Messina's iconic "Portrait of a Young Man" footnotes "Il Cane—After de Messina," whose floppy-eared hound is similarly posed. Hortt also reprises de Messina's trompe-l'oeil signature note: "I made this painting."
But Hortt's mimicry is neither malignant nor slavish. She does not, for example, attempt Bronzino's creamy technique, which makes a bisque-head doll of a Medici child, although the rabies tag on her cute little dog burlesques the child's medallion. The poses are not exact copies but the affinities are uncanny. In "Een Schaap—After Rembrandt" (the titles employ the masters' tongues), the sheep's wool corona recalls the stiff lace ruffle of Rembrandt's subject, Cornelia Pronck.
It's a high-toned joke, but brilliant.
Elsewhere, Hortt uses Polaroid-transfer and other collage techniques to build compositions of mild irony. In "I Believe I Can Fly," a drawn, reclining nude is augmented by three transfers of feathered fingers and a dead bird. "Nine Step Plan," whose frame is tiled in the style of a '50s diner, presents illustrations of a girl's progress toward marriage, evidently from that decade.
Although amiably witty and despite a fondness for clown motifs, Hortt's work is anything but light.
By contrast, Forestieri's intimate paintings are sober renderings of candid moments. I've seen several of these in her 2003 show with Roberta Baskin Shefrin at the Las Vegas Art Museum. Normally, I'd prefer to see fresh work, but this is an opportunity to see familiar pieces from a fresh perspective.
Forestieri's accompanying statement alludes to revelations of magic and beauty in these captured moments. But I find either the allure of the unremarkable, interstitial instant—as in her paintings of performers readying themselves backstage—or the appeal of the tantalizingly ambiguous. No doubt she intended nothing of the sort, but I find something disturbing in the portly man interacting with children in the two "Shannon's Wedding" pictures; perhaps they simply recover unpleasant memories of enduring solicitous relatives at family gatherings.
In any event, the paintings are broadly limned but sharply observed, and say much more than a mere snapshot of the same moments. Her "Showgirls" paintings recall Renoir's dancers and bathers, but with a touch, in tone and feeling, more like Manet's.
Here and there, Forestieri draws attention to artifice, whether it's a woman seated as one element in an array of pictures, or the large portrait of "Amy and Shawn," posed formally by two paintings leaning against a wall.
From these one-person shows, the city galleries move next to group exhibitions organized by Jerry Schefcik, director of UNLV's Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery. Bright Light City (March 18-May 15 at Charleston Heights) and Indulgence (April 8-June 5 at Reed Whipple) promise the attractive prospect of local artists considering aspects of our fair and strange city.