Beyond Baroque

 

Curated by Byran Ida, and featuring the works of Ida, Mb Boissonnault, and Annie Seaton, Littoral is a beautiful look toward the horizon line and the sea. Running through May 5th, the exhibition’s title refers to the “zone where the land, air, and sea come together” as the curator’s notes state, and the three different components of the earth meet.

Photo above: Mike Street captures all three artists, left to right, Seaton, Ida, Boissonault

Littoral is limitless, filled with promise, edged with a poignancy at our inability to comprehend and three artists’ masterful attempts to shape their own comprehension.  It is an exhibition that grasps a moment of alchemy, where a sense of bliss meets the power, danger, and magnitute of nature. It’s an amorphous but profound moment, a transition of sorts, and the three artists here, in different but richly blended ways are seeking to convey it. Using color and composition, form, line, and texture, the artists depict the interaction of humans with natural wonder; even if that interaction is purely by casting our gaze upon it. As the late Tom Petty once sang, it’s “into the great wide open…under them skies of blue…” What will we find there? What do these artists find?

Ida’s work is always highly textured; here he is using tiny points, or dots, to depict air and water and figure, humming along a mystical line between the magical and the discernable.

Above, “Prone.”

 

“Ascension,” above, buries layers of color in shades subtle enough to almost but not quite hide the deep glowing light that seems ready to burst from the depths of the work, created in acrylic on panel.  

Ida’s “Open” intersects water with air. The background specifically, he says, “plays with value and color.”

With “Topside,” Ida captures infinite star-like molecules of water using what he describes as “hundreds of coats of semi-transparent paint to achieve a sense of depth.” Within this, he is giving us a veritable constellation of shapes, or as he terms it “you can see the beginning of some figuration.” In each of his works here, Ida takes us to a place beyond our knowing, yet almost within our reach, seething in and out like the relentless tides, almost carrying us away.

Seaton’s work takes us to a different sort of understanding, to a place where people have met the water and sand and air, and feel as if they know it; you can feel the ocean breezes ruffling their hair; you can sense the palpable joy and tension in the moment of communion with the life of the sea. Below, left,  “Double Indigo Surfer, Rockpiles, North Shore, HI;” to the right, “Indigo Surfer and fins, North Shore, HI.” Both are inkjet prints on washi paper, with indigo dye and linen thread.

Above, she gives us surfers, riding, ready to ride, considering a ride. How we love imagining we are the masters of the mighty forces that draw us to the coast and beyond it, into its tide. There is something comforting in that, and in the quilted structure of this work.

The powerful allure of the sea, and the illusion of taming it; with artist Seaton, above.

Seaton makes these images wonderfully filled with the texture of the sea, with the human desire to be in it, and with it, and of it, to conquor it, civilize it in a sense. Or perhaps what we really want, Seaton suggests, is to ingest some of the sea’s wildness.

Above, “Rose Madder Quilt, Laguna Violet.” Below, “Indigo Surf Quilt: Waves and Boards.”

Boissonault gives us a softer, almost impressionistic look at ocean colors, at catapulting waves, at those dancing horizon lines that lure sailors and give sirens their song. Her jewel like colors and lustrous textures wash over us like the water she depicts.

The sea evokes the heavens as well as the deep. It can lift us up or swallow us whole. We are tiny fish to swim here. Working in oil, oil and synthetic, or oil and acrylic, Boissonault plumbs the depths and we can feel them take us, we are gloriously awash in the tumult.

But we are also entrusted with the shimmering reflective jewels of the water and the way it splashes into the air we breathe, exhilerating us, as in “Find Myself a City to Live in (2),” above.

Above, Boissonault with “Find Myself a City to Live in (3).” The hexagonal shapes that rise out of Boissonault’s waters, above, are mysterious and archetypal, like monoliths of our own construction pushing out from the ocean floor. Or are they citadels, rising, beaming us up through the atmosphere to another realm.

Above, “Find Myself a City to Live in.” Boissonault’s depiction is ethereal here, aglow with promise.

Whether you count yourself as a lover of the sea or a more inland creature, take a swim over to Beyond Baroque in Venice and take in this visceral, vibrant show; dive in to its depths.

Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis; supplemental from Mike Street as indicated, and as provided by the artists.