Holy Melotti...

Sometimes you just walk into a place and you are transformed, changed, magically brought to a different place. This is the experience that I experienced at the Acquavella Galleries on East 79 Street. I had never heard of Fausto Melotti or seen his work and this was a great way to trip over it because it is his first one man show in New York City. It takes up four rooms on two floors and fills it all with marvels, passion and beauty that are an expression of a life well lived. I Started at the back room on the Second Floor as I was directed by the Gallery hostess. I looked, I stared, I smiled at the Sculpture No. 21 that is pictured above fascinated by the sparkling orbs caged by shiny bars, but what struck me like being hit in the head by one of those sparkling orbs from the sculpture was that this was not a sculpture made in the fifties or sixties that I presumed but was made in 1935. This was a time machine experience and would continue to be for the rest of the show. Fausto was born in 1901 and died in 1986 and this work stretches across that life like a moon bow, mixing metal, ceramics, wire, plaster and embraces music to its core. In the second room another sculpture, this a plaster figure standing about nine foot tall entitled, "Constant Man", stands as a solitary human form with an open palm stretched across the chest of the figure. It held me mesmerized, it is so simple, so powerful, so magical. The downstairs rooms are as explosively vital, too. The front room filled with some of the most beautiful sculptures you will ever see, an aesthetic of air, metal and shadows. The backroom with a wall of ceramics that are artistic, fragile and beautifully assigned with a array of other sculptures that capture your imagination, one of them entitled, Rain, stands in the back, wires exploding from above and falling and splashing onto the ground. That is one of the great things about this unbeknownst-to-me artist's work, it lets you imagine and play and you want to see more and more of it. I left the show feeling the more and more, strolled home completely caught up in the magical, heavenly world of Fausto Melotti...

Koons Eye View...

Jeff Koons has been around for a long time creating his morphed popular art vision that I have both loved and loathed. He has a 27,500 foot studio and employs about ninety-five people to make art for him. I have never really respected his hands off approach. It was gray and sprinkling when I decided to take a walk to the Met and see his sculptures on the roof. I was looking forward to it knowing that the weather would keep people off of the roof garden. I entered through the downstairs entrance and paid my usual two dollars for the quick trip to the roof garden. The elevator up was packed but once on the roof there was plenty of room to move. I ordered a red wine from the bar and took a stroll around the three cartoonish sculptures that I wished were bigger, say more like twenty feet tall rather than the diminutive 10 they are. I wished there were more, too. It is always telling on the roof garden if you are looking more at the sculptures or at the view of Central Park and city scapes. On this particular gray day I found most of the people looking out over the park and taking photos of the view rather that looking at the sculptures. The three animated pieces: Balloon Dog, that is pictured above and that I found the most interesting; Sacred Heart wasn't very sacred; and Coloring Book a supposed page from a Winnie The Pooh coloring book that is presented like it would look if colored by a really bad child colorer, it is abstract and just didn't push any buttons for me. So I looked out on the park fresh with leafage and sipped my Merlot and then I looked up at the apartment buildings on the Upper East Side knowing that Jeff Koons owned an opulent apartment somewhere amongst the buildings. I imagined him looking down at the sculptures he had created and wondered what his view was like. From where I was standing the view of the park was a lot more impressive than his sculptures...

It's Wayne's World...

When anger starts filling my veins like hot oil, art is always a way I can recapture my mojo, even if the anger is about a company destroying a beloved piece of art, see my last blog entry. Lucky for me one of the most affable of painters and one of America's most talented was having a show at the Allan Stone Gallery on East 90th, his twenty-third solo show at the eclectic gallery. A short walk I put on a light windbreaker to do exactly that since a breeze was up and the white pedals of street side cherry trees were blowing in the wind looking like snow on a sunny day. The Allan Stone Gallery an old renovated firehouse is an intimate space with a garden in the back that gives it an airy light. Wayne Thiebaud who is well known for his objects and still lifes that he presents in a pop imagery that is all his own, like Dine, but different, most of his work although oil on canvas has hints of watercolor imagery. This show deviating from his object oriented art is titled, The Figure. Drawings and paintings of people who seem to be from another time and age leaning more toward the Saturday Post covers of Norman Rockwell than of anything close to this jaded age. This actually gives the show it's life, a certain feel of a good time had and a reminiscence of a simpler time. His figures are exacting and daring in their simpleness. Most of the art was done in the 1960's which underscores that feeling of being out of time. I walked around the show a couple of times noticing small nuances that I hadn't noticed before and being so pleased at myself for noticing I decided to return to the Allan Stone Gallery in a couple of weeks to see if I can discover anything else. Happily, my stoked anger at the OZ moving company is temporarily stifled by Wayne's world...

Ripped Off By OZ...

I started writing this at the airport in Reno, Nevada, taking my attention away from the slot machines that stand in waiting to take my last few dollars. I have spent the last couple of days at Lake Tahoe, dreaming, golfing and gambling not to mention eating, drinking and relaxing. I am headed back to NYC and the Upper East Side refreshed and full of a need to succeed. But when I get back to the city I get my mail and there it is, the letter from OZ moving that I have been expecting for six months. As I reported six months ago, I moved, and OZ was my choice of mover, a mistake I am still paying for today. What I expected was a check in the envelope of over 3,000 dollars for art and plates they had destroyed in a move that cost me double the price that was estimated and put me in a personally embarrassing position when I did not have the cash on hand that would cover the 15% tip of the new cost. "Testy" is a mild description of what the movers became when they found this out, dropping, tossing boxes in an embattled way so they could 'get the hell out of here'. And in this carelessness the destruction began, a recliner, picture frames, a cordial dish my mother gave me that served as a remembrance of her, some of these OZ did fix, but the worse destruction was one of my prized pieces of art by Marc Travanti, that has moved with me to London twice and moved five times in New York City before it was ripped by OZ on this recent move. This painting has hung in my home for almost 20 years. Travanti, who was in a recent show that got glowing reviews, www.brooklynrail.org/2008/04/artseen/enantiomorphic_chamber, is an artist of eclectic and brilliant inspirations. For the destruction of this piece of art,I placed a rather conservative price of 3,500.00. It was worth way more than that to me and my family. As I had bought extra insurance for just this kind of accident, I felt I could count on OZ to make amends. After six months, weekly calls, two visits and hemming and hawing that bordered on rude, finally I was getting a check. I opened the envelope and was floored when I looked at a check for $200.00 and a snarky letter from Nancy Zafrani the General Manager of OZ, saying that art was exempt from the coverage, which was never mentioned to me in the six months of emails, phone calls and visits by this incredulous moving company. She said that the contract was enclosed with the check detailing this exemption but it was not enclosed. My first thought was to sue, small claims and all that but the time to do that would probably cost me more than the claim and it would not get back the precious piece of art that they destroyed. So instead I decided to wage a campaign of my own using the $200.00 to create posters my minions will distribute on the Upper East Side and also use my writing outlets that includes two columns in international magazines and four other blogs to present the ugly aspects of OZ's dealings with this situation. I hope others that have experienced such disrespect by this moving company might join me. Their corporate headquarters are at 318 East 78th N.Y. N.Y. 10021. I must say this feels good getting it off my chest after six months of frustration and I have to laugh at loud at Ms. Zafrani final sentence in her "buzz off" letter. "We look forward to serving you again should the need arise." Yeah, right, Nancy...

Bad, Boring, Biennial...

I have started to walk to the Whitney to see the Biennial show several times but have ended up being distracted by something else mostly a thought that I knew that the show was considered bad to terrible by everyone who I know saw it. Finally, I got up the energy to deal with it and what everyone said was more than true. It is the god-awfullest Biennial I have ever seen. It seems the Whitney has their head so far up academia's ass all they can see is shit. Beyond the general lack of new ideas a lot of the work was shoddily put together. The videos were astonishingly boring, it seems now that all you have to do is an interview, or a video of your summer vacation and it will reach the realms of high art. If this type of garbage is the highest spectre of the Whitney's expectation of art maybe the curators should spend a couple days watching YouTube or better yet the Jack Ass movies because they contain more examination of a subject that I would consider art than any of what is in this show. The installation pieces were atrocious. I guess raw lumber stuck together to resemble some sort of room is the spirit of the day. There were two artist's works that I did appreciate and saved me from throwing myself on down the granite steps of the museum. They were Charles Long's ghost like sculptures that had a fossil feel created with plaster and found garbage. They were eerily white and hauntingly beautiful. The other art I liked was by John Baldessari, whose Pop Art Images captured with a gifted mind and artistic flare were more than impressive. Beyond those there was nothing I liked much because I have seen it all before and done so much better. With my exasperation I headed for the basement bathroom and took the picture above which was more inspiring than what I saw at the show. And to it's own credit as I left the building the outside installment piece a reinvented turtle pond with a modern art flare that was once in this exact place centuries ago was very interesting and left me with the hope that art is not yet dead....

Spring Has Sprung...

Although it began about three weeks ago, Spring is starting to realize itself now. Daffodils, forsythia, cherry trees, magnolias, tulips and all the rest of the fanfare of springtime flowers are blooming or sprouting and spraying their fresh pollen on the allergy ridden populace. While I was out for my first coat less walk of the seasonto enjoing the first warmish sunny day I overheard a couple walking and holding hands comment on the weather, the girl blushed, 'it's so nice out I feel like getting naked in the park,' the boy stopped, looked around and said 'which ways the park.' I chuckled as I walked by and pointed west and heard the girl say embarrassingly, 'Did he hear me?' I kept walking feeling the sun squirting through the apartment buildings on Park Avenue warming my face. I decided to head to Central Park just in case the opiate of the sun might really make someone strip down and dance in the Great Lawn. The Park was beautiful just on the edge of erupting in blooms and leaves, glowing with the buds that made it appear like it was an impressionist painting. People were lolly-gagging, day-dreaming, laying in the grass looking at the periwinkle blue sky and you could hear the faint melodious sound of a saxophone playing somewhere. The Great Lawn it was teeming with people throwing Frisbees, baseballs and just laying around. I walked to the middle of the Lawn sat down and looked south at Belvedere Tower and Turtle Pond and beyond to the Manhattan skyline rising up in the background like a glorious crown. I took a deep breath and reaffirmed that I lived in one of the greatest places on earth...

Gustave Courbet Day...

The day is spring-like, the tulips on the islands of Park Avenue are sprouting and I've decided instead of going to the Biennial at the Whitney, where I surely would be disappointed, I would walk to the Met and see the Courbet show. 130 paintings of the "self proclaimed proudest and most arrogant man in France." And when you see that about half of the 130 paintings are self-portraits, the statement holds some truth. It's much less than that, but the show is top-heavy with his many self portraits in all of his imaginings of himself. Not that that is bad, the cheapest model in the world for any artist are themselves. But as I lolly-gagged through the exhibit because the beauty of some of the paintings are mind-boggling. Self portraits, portraits, landscapes, nudes, still life, animals, nudes, nudes... I'll get to the nudes later. To see a portrait of the poet Baudelaire who used to hide out in Courbet's studio dodging his landlord is priceless. But what I found to be Courbet's greatest subject were animals whether they be a part of a landscape or somewhat of a portrait in themselves. As he was a hunter his hunting paintings are inspiring. Having fans of the likes of everyone from Cezanne to Picasso in fine art the people that he might have had the biggest influence on are "pornographers" which with all it's negative references might be off-putting, but is not. Most of his nudes are lavish set pieces of curvaceous woman lingering outside. But a couple of the nudes which were privately commissioned are tastefully pornographic. With this in mind the Met seems to have set up the nudes room to capture this by placing a wall in the middle to delineate between the two and when you walk behind the wall it's like walking into a peep show, with drawings, paintings, photographs and a kaleidoscope-like-contraption that you look into to see a vagina that threatens one's own promiscuity. Through it all you are left to see a man who might seem arrogant but is truly a man who knew himself, he rejected the Legion of Honor in France, to be free and independent from any form of government. He not only knew himself he knew how to paint and forecast the future with a realism that makes your mouth water, your eyes search and your heart realize the truth in matters...