Diana Al-Hadid, Cordy Ryman and Jennifer Riley at Peel

I never know what to think of Peel. On one hand, it's a jewelry store (kind of). And jewelry is something that not only doesn't interest me, but also something which I instinctively feel doesn't overlap with any of my interests. This probably reflects my fundamental dude-ness. I've never worn an earring or necklace or bracelet. I only slip on my class ring for alumni functions. I guess what I'm saying is that my personal indifference to jewelry is probably blinding me to the fact that many people who are deeply interested in jewelry are also deeply interested in art. And Peel seems to have made it a mission to reach people who are deeply interested in both.

The current show, "Nowness," is all art. It was curated by Lea Weingarten, who is probably better known by her married name, Lea Fastow. She spent a year in prison for Enron-related crimes. I am inclined to feel as Obama did when asked about Michael Vick--people who have paid their debt to society deserve a second chance. That said, when I went to the Peel Gallery website and clicked on the link under her name, I got a "Malicious Web Site Blocked" message. The name of her website is contemporaryconnoisseur (dot) com, and I don't suggest you visit it--Norton Safe Web identified it as having 18 computer threats. I still want to believe Lea Weingarten is a reformed member of society, but she really needs to clean up her website which is attempts to download malicious code into the computers of people who visit it. Not cool.

Anyway, the art is the important thing. I enjoyed two of the thee artists here. The best was Diana Al-Hadid.


Diana Al-Hadid, untitled, xerox transfer, conte, shellac, 2008

Her pieces in this show all resemble this--ghostly grey shapes fully of swirling texture. When I saw them, I thought of rubbings from nature--where you take a piece of paper and a soft lead pencil and place it on a tree's bark or a large rock, and rub the paper with the pencil to capture the pattern of texture of the bark or stone. The scale of these drawings tells me that they can't be actual rubbings, but given that they were made partly with xerox, they could be a composite of rubbings, or one rubbing blown up large.

The textures relate the drawings to her sculptures (none of which are in this show, alas), which have highly textured surfaces. Of course, one also thinks of Max Ernst's "frottages"--rubbings--that he used as elements in his paintings. But Al-Hadid's work has a different feel than the often apocalyptic frottage paintings of Ernst. These drawings are spectral and feel like images that can't quite be perceived.


Cody Ryman, Bars and Stripes, acrylic, enamel, wood and fiberglass mesh on Gator board, 2009

Cody Ryman's work is like a cargo cult version of minimalism or color field painting. So you get a little Frank Stella (above), a little Larry Poons (below) and so on.


Cordy Ryman, Nelma Stamp, acrylic, enamel and ink on wood, 2010

Of course, a Frank Stella painting is a highly crafted object made of extremely durable materials. Ryman, on the other hand, glued wood to Gatorboard--which is a kind of heavy-duty polystyrene foam material. Everything about his versions of minimalism is designed to undercut minimalism's austere authority. He's like Frank Stella's hillbilly cousin, constructing items exclusively out of the junk pile in the back yard. It's a parody, essentially, and I find it pretty amusing.


Cordy Ryman, Frosted Corner, acrylic and enamel on wood, 2008

I mean, who wouldn't like a Dan Flavin sculpture where the fluorescent tube had been replaced by Pop-Tarts? That said, this work seems to have nowhere to go. You have a laugh and move on. In this regard, these paintings are quite unlike the haunting drawings of Al-Hadid.


Jennifer Riley, Modernissimo, oil on canvas, 2010

Jennifer Riley also seems to be making a pastiche of early modernist abstraction. But her's is not really all that amusing. I feel like she wants her paintings to be wacky and playful but only achieves dryness. Weirdly enough, her work reminds me of the work of cartoonist/painter Mary Fleener, who refers to her own style as "cubismo" (!). But Fleener's work has a barbaric energy that these lifeless paintings utterly lack. This kind of energy is also present in Ryman's nutty work--placing it in the same room as Riley's paintings was probably a bad idea.

Richard Martinez' Shaped Canvases

Robert Boyd

If you are driving around Rice Military looking for the Darke Gallery, the only thing to visually distinguish it from the tall townhouses that populate that neighborhood's small blocks is this sculpture:



When I went in, I met the owner of the gallery, Linda Darke Swaynos. She told me about the show they had up (paintings by Richard Martinez) and in the process described her strategy for selecting artists. Her artists tend to be art professors at various universities around Texas. As she put it, many of them are in areas with few or no art galleries and little opportunity to show their work. And practically every university in the state (and the whole country, too) has some art teachers, and many have art departments and a brace of professors. So for her, this forms a nice pool of talent from which to pick artists to exhibit.

Richard Martinez teaches art at U.T. San Antonio. His canvases are not strikingly original. When one thinks of shaped canvases and stripes, one thinks of Frank Stella works from the early '60s. Martinez' canvases are mostly monochrome (the spaces between the stripes are subtly different shades of the same color as the stripes) but unlike those early Stella pieces, they are brightly colored. The shapes, too, are different--baroque and even rococo, in a way. (This, too, recalls Stella--but the later Stella of the wall sculptures.)



Richard Martinez, Young American, 2009

The pieces also all have a single painted element in silhouette. This is another little baroque touch.


Richard Martinez, Ultra 19, 2009

There is not that much to say about these. This isn't quite a situation of "What you see is what you see." But close.


Richard Martinez, Ultra 18, 2009


Richard Martinez, Ultra 18 detail, 2009

The thing is, I like these paintings. It was pleasant being in a room with them. And that's enough.

Darke showed me another piece from her most recent show that I really liked.



Marcelyn McNeil, Study 2, painted strips of wood, 2009

Again, this was a nice piece to share a room with. It was fun to walk around it taking pictures.



Marcelyn McNeil, Study 2, painted strips of wood, 2009

I like the fact that it is a sculpture, and a fairly large one at that, but that it remains so low to the ground. I like that you have to look down to really see it. It also reminds me of canoes I saw in Brazil.