Explore the '30 Parallel'

By TANYA PEREZ-BRENNAN

Because humans have always been drawn to stories, it makes sense that the art world continues to visually explore narrative compositions.

It also explains why the Jacksonville Museum of Modern Art chose "30th Parallel: A Convergence of Contemporary Painting" as its new show for fall. The exhibit contains a good representation of narrative works, paintings that use figurative representation to tell a story.

Museumgoers can see the works starting Thursday and until Wednesday, Jan. 4. The gallery will also run a second show concurrently, thanks to increased gallery space after a renovation.

"30th Parallel" features 10 well-known regional painters who have exhibited nationally. George Kinghorn, deputy director and chief curator of JMOMA, said that in the process of doing research for a show, he consistently found the strongest work was narrative, abstract or neo-abstract.

"It's really a mirror of what's happening in the larger art world nationally," he said.

Many narrative artists use similar methods: a lot of layering of different images, many culled from history or religion. The artists sometimes use paint with charcoal and meticulously draw well-defined figures in the composition.

Radcliffe Bailey, a well-known Atlanta artist whose work is in the show, makes mixed-media pieces by combining black-and-white vintage photographs amid compositions crammed with numbers, bright colors and other iconography. Many of the themes Bailey addresses in his work relate to African-American identity and history.

In One of Four Corners (2005), a photograph of a young boy sits in the center of the composition. Amid the black and brown background are lines of green and orange with white numbers clustered in different corners.

"It's about seeing the world from up above," Bailey said during a visit to JMOMA. "It's a mixture of stuff."

People will also see that random juxtaposition of images in John Bailly's work. The Miami-based painter uses everything from religious symbols to historic figures to make his large, intricately layered works. In Metropolitan Transit (2002), the figurative and the abstract seem to merge with overlapping figures and images. On closer examination, there is a double image of the Roman Colosseum with a portrait of Paul Robeson in the background.

Bailly's new work explores the ways humans try to organize information and make sense of what surrounds them.

"My paintings are trying to show the changing nature of reality," Baily said by telephone from Miami. "How do we formulate our reality?"

Viewers will find a more disturbing example of narrative work in James Barsness' large-scale piece The Prize (2001). His painting about the post-Sept. 11 world includes a plane being torn by the crude, cartoonlike characters sitting on it and dangling from its wings.

"It's a visual metaphor for a bureaucracy in crisis," Kinghorn said. "The plane is half human."

The show's neo-abstract and abstract work typically relies more on a visual aesthetic than on telling a visual story. Luisa Basnuevo's pieces seem to bridge the narrative and abstract worlds, but their painterly quality and luminosity are aesthetically pleasing. In Pradera Roja (2004), Basnuevo incorporates the imagery of eucalyptus seeds from her childhood amid a luminous red and orange backdrop.

Tanya Perez-Brennan is the art critic for The Florida Times-Union. This article was originally published in The Florida Times-Union of Jacksonville on September 9, 2005.

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