5/1/03
angle magazine
a journal of arts + culture
Richard Lazzaro and Ed Shalala @ Gallery Ü
By Douglas Max Utter
The aesthetic implications of marking and layering have been among the principal expressive considerations of painters and printmakers during the past half-century. Ed Shalala and Richard Lazzaro are two Cleveland-born artists who have enjoyed a degree of national and international exposure over the past four decades exploring these critical issues.
Shalala’s double suite of small paintings face each other from the end walls of Patsy Kline’s Gallery Ü. Lumpy and colorful, each is a phase of self-examination that alternately delves into and covers over the psychological hints that it discovers. These process-oriented, essentially surrealist works emphasize the psychic dimensions of a painted surface, and the rich associations evoked by complex textures. Obsessive almost to an extreme, Shalala’s oil, burlap, and string-on-canvas compositions often include as many as forty layers of paint on surfaces measuring between 8” x 12” to 16” x 20.”
Two Blues and Yellow is typically enigmatic. Its uneven accumulation of paint over burlap patches suggests forms in the way an abstract sculpture might. Raised, smoothed bas-relief-like encrustations of deep blue alternate with shallow ravines where sparks and rivulets of luminous yellow are visible, suggesting light and energy. Meanwhile, the regular pattern of the burlap weave contributes areas of more orderly terrain to a vision that seems like a relief map or heat-sensitive, infra-red study of repression and the intricate flow of psychic energy.
Richard Lazzaro’s Taiwan paintings are visually pleasing gouache-on-paper studies of human intimacy, moving blithely from the abstract qualities of interlocking lines to an overlying, more deliberately figurative, macrocosmic dimension. The emotional content of Lazzaro’s work is more overt than Shalala’s, but while a painting like his 25” x 35” Kiss strives for a degree of equivalence between paint and intricate webs of human feeling, it also conveys a sense of humor and contains a sort of art-historical, visual essay. The three ovate forms in Kiss intersect, describing an overlapping of bodies and lives. Only the central “head” has a profile. On the right an orange, maze-like spiral is emblematic of pregnancy. The cool greens and blues of the central couple complement each other, while around them hot yellow lines create a densely passionate conversation. At the same time, another sort of conversation is visible: Mark Tobey chats with Brice Marden, while Philip Guston shares his thoughts with Jean DuBuffet.
05/23/03
The Plain Dealer
ART MATTERS
Abstract Artists Make Most of Ideal ARTcade setting
by Dan Tranberg
Some art galleries are like white cubes. The relatively new Gallery Ü , part of the ARTcade in downtown Cleveland's Colonial Marketplace, is like a glass box.
As with all of the shops inside the arcade, the wide and unusually shallow gallery space has a completely transparent facade, making it look like one big display window. Its clean lines and stark, uncluttered design make it a perfect setting for contemporary art.
This month's exceptionally attractive exhibition at Gallery U features works by Richard Lazzaro and Edward Shalala, two out-of-town artists with direct ties to Cleveland.
Lazzaro is an emeritus professor of art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and co-owner of an art gallery in Stoughton, Wis. He's also a 1959 graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art. His works, collectively titled "The Taiwan Series," loosely play off of the general idea of Chinese calligraphy, though they don't look the slightest bit Asian. With their colorful, free-form calligraphic lines, they more closely resemble funky American fabric designs from the 1950s.
Lazzaro is clearly well-versed in the subtleties of form and color. Every one of his paintings on paper is characterized by a precarious balance of bold shapes and delicate lines, all swimming around in undulating waves of color. In some, his playful lines accumulate into dense thickets that practically vibrate from the intensity of their shifting hues.
While Lazzaro's orientation appears to come directly out of Abstract Expressionism, the work of Shalala is more closely aligned with current trends in abstract painting. His handsome group of small, heavily textured canvases, titled "Syntheses: Color and Texture," places great emphasis on the physical, organic properties of paint.
A Cleveland native who moved to New York in 1978, Shalala seems to build his paintings like relief sculptures. He gradually accumulates a mixture of paint and burlap, which eventually takes on the look of heavy weathering. Adding a certain dynamic tension is the objectlike quality of Shalala's canvases, most of which are a foot or so tall and less than a foot wide. They are little constructions as much as they are paintings, which is interesting considering painting's long history of flatness.
Distinguishing them from the abstract paintings of decades past is their extreme focus on the materiality of paint, which brings into question the nature of paint as an object in and of itself. In a sense, they are like paintings of paint.
Gallery curator Patsy Kline, a designer who graduated in 1990 from the Cleveland Institute of Art, deserves accolades for assembling such a thoughtfully focused show.
Hopefully, it's just one of many to come.
The ARTcade is at 530 Euclid Ave., Cleveland; the exhibit is up through May 31. Call 216-323-0085.