Linden Frederick & Seven Contemporary Guest Artists
A gathering of paintings by some of the country’s most intriguing contemporary painters will soon be staged at Haynes Galleries in Franklin. The exhibition is led by Linden Frederick’s honest and ominous nocturnes. Exceptional pieces by guest artists Alan Feltus, Alan Magee, Alyssa Monks, Guillermo Muñoz Vera, Brian Rutenberg, Tula Telfair, and Jesus Villarreal round out the show. Clarity of artistic vision and craft are the common threads of their artworks. The exhibition is a collaboration with Forum Gallery, New York. “Linden Frederick & Seven Contemporary Guest Artists” begins May 2 and continues until June 29, 2019.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is Frederick’s Vacant, a painting created during a special cross-genre collaboration. While stories and the written word have inspired visual artworks for millennia, this idea was flipped a few years ago. Maine-based Frederick began a new series of his nocturnal landscapes and a handful of the country’s best writers were asked to put into words what sprang forth when they viewed a painting. Novelist Ann Patchett, author of the award-winning Bel Canto, was paired with Vacant, a nighttime view of a home seen from afar. Frederick, as with many of his paintings, manages to create a scene that is crisp, foreboding, calm, and enticing.
The guest artists work in different styles depicting a variety of genres. There is Magee’s hyperreal observations of familiar objects, like paint tubes or smooth river rocks, arranged & composed in a modernist manner.
With an interest in history in its various forms, Muñoz Vera applies his technical prowess to both still lifes and exteriors that exude the elegance and importance of his subjects.
The majesty of the natural world appear in Telfair’s paintings. Views of icebergs on perfectly still arctic water obscure their size and danger, while a mountain range drenched in the red glow of the setting sun feels other-worldly.
The figure also makes appearance in the exhibition in various forms. Monks’s portraits enshroud her subjects in elements of nature, like foam or immersed in a forrestscape. Villarreal’s cool self portrait ponders his own status, and Feltus’s figures and groupings recall traditional poses but with an enigmatic, surrealistic edge.
A dive into abstraction appear in Brian Rutenberg’s nature-based abstract paintings. For years Rutenberg has executed paintings like Low Light 2 that embrace spirituality, love of color, and a passion for the paint itself.
These are heavy hitters of contemporary painting. But their paintings don’t feel oppressive in their grandness. Rather they envelope viewers in a mood, idea, or state of being, just as a written story would.
