Tony Berlant
A five-year-old at Klein Art Works during one of my visits to the Tony Berlant exhibit immediately asked a key question: “Why are these paintings full of nails?” While from a distance Berlant’s Night’s Light No. 41 seems filled with pale stars, from closer the stars seem gray, and from closer still it’s clear that many tiny brads are punctuating the surface. For the truth is that, though these 24 recent works use the vocabulary of abstract painting, they’re actually constructions of metal Berlant salvaged from thrift shops–TV trays, wastebaskets–printed with brightly colored designs. He also uses factory rejects, nearly monochromatic metal sheets–“the beautiful ‘mistakes’ the painting machines make,” he calls them. He cuts up his found metal and nails the pieces, collagelike, to wood. The brads are everywhere, more than one per inch, of necessity: Berlant told me that with fewer nails the metal would eventually curl or buckle. But he also allowed that he’d probably use as many brads even if they weren’t essential: “They build up the energy of the surface the way brush strokes or pencil marks do.”
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Berlant, 54, a Los Angeles area resident, cites a wide variety of influences. He collected minerals as a child and still recalls the “minimalist structure and the geometry of crystals.” In his late teens he was drawn to the work of Joseph Cornell, John Chamberlain, Robert Rauschenberg–artists whose work confounds the traditional distinctions between painting, sculpture, and collage. In about 1962, watching from his studio in Venice as a little market was being torn down, Berlant was struck by the beauty of its layers of metal signs. He brought them back to the studio just to look at them but soon started cutting them up and using them in his art. He also loves “Chinese and Japanese scroll paintings where you can’t get everything in one big bang, but which you have to explore like real life, in your own kind of time sequence.” He collects pre-Columbian Mimbres bowls in which the forms are “so perfectly balanced” with the surrounding spaces “that figure-ground relationships disappear. There are no negative spaces.” The same might be said of his own work: the large areas of abstraction or of dark metal are as compelling as the “figures.”
Bloom No. 23 at first seems more explicable, almost a metaphor for art making. Concentric squares of blue and tan faux wood grain–originally the sides of a children’s swimming pool–create the illusion of a traditional picture frame, leading the eye toward the center of the image. There a headlike shape floats in darkness, surrounded by brightly colored “petals” almost as if it were flowering, an image suggesting the triumph of human creativity. But if one looks harder, the indecipherable fragments that make up the head reassert themselves.
Gargiulo, 46 and a Chicago native, writes that this show is “an investigation of what is UP. Often things that aren’t supposed to hold up do and things you expect to hold up break down.” Most of the works take some paradoxical approach to direction: things that are “up” can crush; climbing a wall can lead to death. Both Gargiulo and Berlant are seeking visual forms that subvert some of the traditional Western hierarchies–up and down, figure and ground, even artwork and viewer.
