Portland Art Openings, March 2024

Spring is in the air. On Thursday, the night was dry and warm, a welcome change to greet visitors of the First Thursday Art Walk in the Pearl. It couldn’t be better for a group of young girls, most still in their team jerseys and shorts, coming from a winning match, jumping into Laura Vincent Gallery. They were there to see their coach Paul Xavier Rutz’s exhibition, with many pieces that capture themselves in action.

A few blocks away, Augen Gallery features works by Portland native artist Sally Cleveland. Most of her works are small humanized landscapes on paper. Rooted in realism, Cleveland portrays the familiar or remote scenes with acuteness and sensitivity. In Cow and Yellow Marker, the cows in an idyllic marshland would have been at home in the Dutch Hague School, had not the yellow marker, a distinct modern-era nuisance, taken the center stage. Photoshop AI would have eliminated that out-of-place intrusion. But for Cleveland, the intrusion is the charm. The deliberation of absent-mindedness in composition is both a ceding to how our vantage point has been transformed by our own activity and a determined departure from the traditional landscape. The same charm hits home in A Blue Place in Vermont. A few old, dilapidated buildings are placed in the center, echoing the passage of time, but our consciousness cannot stay away from a nearby building in a side view, under an eerie green light.  

The sense of Portlandia is evident in how Cleveland pushes the luminosity of oil paint to capture moisture. Even when the wetness is not depicted such as in the painting Chairs and Cow by the West Window, we can still sense the rain cloud looming on the horizon, from the saturated green and the reflection of stiles on a chair’s leather fabric. It just feels wet, and hence, like home. 

That is the largest in the show, measured as 14 by 10 inches. The size matters here — not despite of, but because of its intimate scale. It is hard to paint details convincingly, and harder to squeeze them into a tiny space. But what is most captivating about this body of work is how Cleveland stays loose and free while directing our focus on the essential details, atmosphere, and mood.

Next door, Froelick Gallery features Kevin Kadar’s works – also landscape with oil on paper, also relatively modest in dimensions. But those are the only similarities between the two exhibitions. For the rest, Kadar is going in the opposite direction, asking “how can a landscape painting stay completely loose and spontaneous but conjure the same grandeur of an old master European painting?”

If Cleveland uncovers poetic quality in unassuming places, Kadar encapsulates picturesque splendor with sparkling touches and dexterous manipulation. Indeed, from afar, the works look like small copies by Poussin or Delacroix. Yet, Kadar’s way of handling paint, with visible brush strokes and deliberate scratches is nothing like the flat and smooth surface from old masters. It is his deep knowledge of the compositional formula for classic landscape paintings and his facility with the color palette that makes such a contemporary twist convincing, and surprisingly refreshing.

One day, AI may advance enough to create a pixelized illusion to emulate the style, but Kadar’s work is more than pixels. The paint has life and is enjoyable to behold close-ups. There is a DeKooning there, inside Poussin. That’s rad.

At Waterstone Gallery, we talked with Ruth Hunter (cover image) about her solo exhibition “Of Heart and Hand.” Hunter is a new member of the gallery, who traveled from Texas to the east coast and eventually arrived in Portland as a climate refuge. Process and material are inseparable parts of this body of work. Working with oil and cold wax, Hunter seldom starts with a clear idea but lets her intuition and mark-making lead her to the destination. She paints on panels, which can handle her intensive “interrogation” better. 

In Blue World, that search took a while. She was struggling until the hint of blue guided her to catch the elusive idea of whales. From there, she added the white horizontal lines for crashing waves. The abstraction comes from the juxtaposition of an aerial view with a side view, where the curved line serves as both the length of a beach and the depth of an ocean. If her penchant for intense colors and subtracted compositions appear naive, the painting surface speaks of sophistication – a combination of abandonment and extreme care. 

Indeed, Hunter’s works are meant to be seen in person. They don’t just hang on a wall, they set the tone in a room. The rich colors and the textured surfaces have so much depth from the physicality of the painting itself. The scintillating effect reminds me of Adolphe Monticelli. The figurative abstraction, on the other hand, recalls the efficiency of Milton Avery in their gestural and broody quality. 

In Gathering Woman, the forest is thinning out in the fall, penetrable enough to let light and haze render the background a tapestry of texture. Hunter treats the mysterious figure with the same facility as the rest: layers are built up and then dappled, scumbled, and scratched away to blend into an autumnal gray. Yet, on the right edge, a vividly rendered red wing black bird jumps into the picture frame, or perhaps out of it, like the sound of a pianoforte breaking the passage of pianissimo. 
A few small paintings are grouped together near the window. They are like memory paintings. Isn’t that funny that feelings emerge where details recede? In Under the Spell of the Black Tea, two figures seem to have a good time. It takes guts to scratch through a small painting and make the scribbled lines part of the storytelling. And we know that the black tea must be good, through a hint of red from one chair leg, among otherwise a sea of grays.