Portraiture
At Gillock Gallery
Lawrence
Smith
It’s another inauguration for Gillock
Gallery. This time, Gillock moves back into Evanston and christens a
new space in the Carlson Building, right across the street from the
Evanston library. It’s a nice location. The space is small, but
surprisingly effective; there’s wall space for small and
middle-sized works (and even a couple large pieces), and the two rooms
allow for a flowing, contrasting viewing experience.
The portraiture show that opened Friday,
March 2nd is a small grouping of mostly oil paintings. Matt Ballou, Ann Ponce, and Gay Riseborough
have shown with Gillock Gallery consistently in the past, and they
don’t disappoint in this outing. Riseborough’s work Snakes on
the Stairs is a particularly theatrical work, and it dominates
both the wall on which it is hung and the entire show as well. With
its dramatic use of light and dark, of angle and spacing, the large
oil painting on linen displays Riseborough’s practiced sensibility
for composition, color, and drama. The massive snakes sliding
ominously down the stairs contrast with the compressed figure – a
self-portrait – that fearfully recoils from their passing.
Ann Ponce’s self-portrait is as much
about emotional composure as Riseborough’s was about emotional
distress. Here she presents herself as singular – the painter as
confident avatar of the arts. From the velvet plush of her dress to
the pthalo glint of the large brush that she holds like a scepter,
Ponce’s painting is at once a traditional conception of the painter
within the whole of the arts and a self-conception of the artist
herself – a perfect kind of self-portrait.
Ballou brings two works respectively titled
Leena Reading about Nerdrum and Portrait of My Father.
The portrait of the artist’s father is the more remarkable of the
two. The white-haired man’s strange, yet matter-of-fact expression
is intriguing, as is the plastic, sculptural quality to Ballou’s
paint. This painterly fullness is a quality of many of Ballou’s
smaller works, as is the nice saturation of color he achieves. Both
paintings demonstrate his excellent building of form in the features
of his subjects.
Newcomer Olivia Ortega shows two drawings
framed together. The leftmost of the pair, titled Ari, is a
striking image. Invested with what seems to be an almost spiritual
inflection, the small drawing on paper is as intense a portrait as one
might hope to see. It has a duality of feeling in its making, full of
confidence and naïveté. Both works show strength of handling that
balances the direct observation of facts with a sense of knowing
depiction. This balance imbues them with a sense of willfulness on the
part of the artist; she knows what she sees and knows what she wants
to see. They are an exciting, engaging pair of drawings.
Once again Gillock Gallery brings together a collection of
works in an unorthodox space that exhibit quality and confidence. The
generic sense of a portrait show falls away in the specific instances
of the works on display here. It is a surprise and delight to see how
this grouping of works transforms the space, bringing that particular
Gillock Gallery flair to yet another location.
