'Business in the Front, Party in the Back'
Art Palace Through March 11

By Rachel Koper
Austin Chronicle
February 6, 2009

Heyd Fontenot has a stunning show of his new portrait paintings up at Art Palace. Featuring groupings of large oils on canvas and montages of small watercolors on paper, the exhibit shows a deep dramatic tension between the characters. This is established with plenty of direct eye contact and couples posing together. Big Dan With Nigel features a man who stares off to the left, ignoring a woman on his lap who stares at his face, her attentive gaze going unreturned. In Dave & Ellen Embracing, it's the woman who won't stare back at the man. In all of the large works, the situations are similarly loaded emotionally and point to complicated relationships, partially requited love, and a variety of longings. Are they tragic? No more so than real life.

For a show full of naked people, it's quite serious. The subjects include men and women, donkeys and goats, as well as Asians, beards, doe-eyed brunettes, and sturdy Polish builds. In his statement about the show, Fontenot writes: "Coitus/conquest is not the focus. Sexual expression is a metaphor for communication. What attracts me most are social politics, personalities, and relationships, either actual or fictionalized."

Fontenot has also incorporated expressionism in loose backgrounds. A virtuosic talent, he leaps from realism to a Frankenthaler-styled abstract expressionism. The contrast and tension between the tight rendering of the figures and the loose color fields is a unique effect. Fontenot's controlled ability to render takes the back seat, and we see a more emotional side, with bleeding and wild colors that add to the dramatic narrative aspects of the work. These backgrounds feel vulnerable, spontaneous, like he's finally letting us see a sloppy side of him. Fontenot said, "I will expose my personal vulnerabilities just as the models have."

His past backgrounds were tidy, hard-edged, like geometric pinstripes. The new pieces such as Double Amy shatter this pattern; the paint is applied in great washes, with swishy brushwork, pours, drips, and splatters. It feels energetic, unburdened, raw, and honest. His good composition and sophisticated palette remain intact while he uses the negative spaces to complement the drama and interpersonal relationships.

So as not to be one-sidedly serious, Fontenot calls the show "Business in the Front, Party in the Back." As a Michigander, I came to know a mullet as a "hockey haircut," meaning one that didn't interfere with your vision on the ice and blocked the wind on the back of your neck. It was omnipresent and no big deal unless the mullet's owner flirted and said, "Business in the front, party in the back." This was often interpreted as a sexual proposition – back seats of cars being well-documented hotbeds of fornication. Fontenot is from Louisiana, where the mullet had nothing to do with hockey, but in his artist's statement, he makes reference to the haircut, wisely noting that "it tried to accommodate a professional façade while giving a glimpse into the wearer's wilder, rebellious side. ... Seeking legitimacy has its complications and its awkward results."

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Blanton Museum of Art
Atrium blues

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
February 13, 2009

The atrium of the Blanton Museum of Art's Michener Gallery Building was designed to make a statement, and until recently that statement seemed to be: white! Here was this vast open space, with natural light streaming in on walls two stories high, and they had nothing on them but paint the color of a snowman's back. Since the staircase leading to the second-floor collections cuts through the atrium, walking up or down gave one plenty of time to notice those bare walls and the conspicuous absence of art.

Well, that's changed as of Jan. 31. The atrium is now host to an artwork almost as epic as the space itself: 3,100 square feet of custom-cast acrylic in various shades of blue, laid out in horizontal bands from the ground floor almost to the top of the staircase. Titled Stacked Waters, the installation is the work of 2005 MacArthur Fellow Teresita Fernández, who was commissioned to create it for the Blanton through the generosity of museum patrons Jeanne and Michael Klein. It plays on the artist's longstanding interests in our relationships with the natural world and architecture, how materials in a built environment can be manipulated to suggest nature, and immersing viewers in a piece. Stacked Waters – art fans who have made the pilgrimage to Marfa may pick up on the title's tip of the hat to Donald Judd – pretty much turns the Blanton's atrium into a huge pool of water, with natural light playing on the reflective striations of blue and white in much the way it does with standing water in a pool. Fernández has also indicated that she intends the bands to function as a mirror, capturing Blanton visitors as we move in and out of "the pool" and creating "a changing portrait of Texas light." A traveling exhibition of other recent work by the artist will land at the Blanton Nov. 1 for a two-month run. For more information, visit www.blantonmuseum.org.

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Austin Arts at the Armory
Where art history is made

By Rachel Koper
Austin Chronicle
February 27, 2009

Every year I pore over websites about the Armory Show in New York City. This was the first, the original American art fair; it is the mother ship, and Pier 94 in March is legendary stuff, where the heroes of contemporary art go to mingle and make art history. I'm thrilled to report that this year, three Austin galleries are attending the large satellite art fairs that now orbit the Armory Show and form Armory Arts Week: Lora Reynolds Gallery at Pulse, Art Palace at Volta, and Okay Mountain at Scope.

Volta NY, on Fifth Avenue and 35th Street, was founded in 2005 in Basel, Switzerland, and features only solo projects. Art Palace will present Sterling Allen's ABC Project, a show of recombined toys and objects that morph into 26 freaky Muppet-like sculptures, one for each letter of the alphabet. "I started with a drawing representing each letter (apple, boat, car, dog, elephant, etc.) and drew it over and over until something different emerged," he writes. "From that new vision came the sketch for the individual sculptures." So he's in good form for the big leagues.

Lora Reynolds Gallery has participated in Pulse in London in 2007 and Miami in 2008, and gallery Associate Director Elizabeth Chiles is happy to be returning for Pulse New York 2009 to show work by Tom Molloy. "We like the Pulse team and think they do a good job of being organized [and] friendly and of attracting quality galleries to participate," Chiles says. "A solo booth is a great way to introduce the work in a thorough way to the fair audience. We also feel that Molloy's work, inspired by current events and in its beautiful craft, can find a strong audience at this time."

Scope is an invitation-only exhibition auspiciously held at Lincoln Center. This is all-important stuff, as the Scope website states: "Introducing artists, curators, and cutting-edge galleries to new audiences internationally has made Scope the most comprehensive destination for the emerging art world available anywhere." Okay Mountain, honored with its first invitation this year, will be showing works by Anna Krachey (Austin), sculptures by Jesse Greenberg (Philadelphia) and Colin Leipelt (Kansas City), and collaborative paintings and drawings by the Okay Mountain collective. Flexing its flexibility, Okay Mountain includes a performance called Poem Store, by Zach Houston (San Francisco), to run the length of the fair.

Congratulations to all of these talented artists and galleries. Way to shine bright on the world stage.

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