Antonio Puri

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The Patriot News

Art to bring you full circle

Sunday, July 18, 2004

BY ZACHARY LEWIS

"Alexander Calder and the Natural Cycle" and "Inner Circles," two loosely connected new exhibits in Harrisburg's Susquehanna Art Museum, derive their power from the strength of the circle as a timeless artistic form.

Neither does so in a forced or didactic way. Both shows leave aside academic lessons to offer pure enjoyment of art for art's sake.

In the case of "Inner Circles," the shape is literally the theme. It appears in nearly every work by seven living, Philadelphia-based, artists: David Foss, James Fuhrman, Michelle Marcuse, Antonio Puri, Vincent Romaniello, Eleanor Schimmel and Tremain Smith.

Circles are everywhere in the Calder show, too, but they serve less as a theme than as a diving board into the philosophical and intellectual ocean behind the work.

It's nice to see Calder honored so prominently at the Susquehanna Art Museum. After all, his work is greatly appreciated in Harrisburg. Much of the show, including the only mobile, is on loan from local private collections. There's even a city street named after him.

Those who know Calder only for his gigantic steel animals and his hanging sculptures (one of which rotates gracefully above the main lobby of the Philadelphia Museum of Art) will be surprised to find almost nothing of the sort in "The Natural Cycle."

This show introduces the far lesser-known, two-dimensional Calder, the lithographs, gouaches, and tapestries that typically don't attract as much attention as the immense public installations.

All of them carry the Calder imprint: bright colors, primary shapes (including circles) and patterns. And even though they're relatively small, Calder still wants you to think big -- well beyond the seemingly limited spatial dimensions of the medium.

Unless, of course, you're looking at something like "Snail and Fish." That's where he's just after a smile, the same reaction he probably wanted from his children when he constructed an ingenious set of toys for them.

The sole example here of Calder's kinetic art is a small but exquisite mobile whose red-painted steel leaves might once have been the scraps from a larger work.

Each stem rotates independently but is connected above and below to another just like it. Spinning in response to the gentlest currents, the piece traces invisible circles in the air and resembles a mathematical fraction that could go on indefinitely, much like the ratio between the diameter and circumference of a circle.

Calder's work in this show seems effortless and spontaneous, as if anyone skilled with metal could duplicate it, which couldn't be further from the truth. By contrast, much of what's in "Inner Circles" makes quite clear the skilled, intense and probably messy physical effort behind it.

Tremain Smith's beeswax paintings were perhaps the most labor-intensive of the bunch. They are also some of the most complex visually.

Their thick, semi-transparent gloss permits views above, below and through the surface onto patterns, some of them circular, scratched on earth-colored backgrounds. Like Calder, Smith wants to (and does) convey an almost spiritual transcendence, something far beyond the obvious.

Michelle Marcuse makes use of comparable techniques but on a lesser scale. Her preferred surface tends to be small cubes of masonite or wood panel arranged in some domino pattern.

Though beautifully executed, the pieces feel needlessly cramped, as if the artist wanted to do something grander but arbitrarily confined her ideas to 6-inch squares. Wispy titles such as "At the Edge of the Sky" and a barrage of confusing art-speak do little to save them.  

Nor is there much to take from a group of cloudy, pastel-colored vistas by Vincent Romaniello. Dotted with thumb tacks and string and given titles such as "The Beauty of Hope" and "Passing Through," they might just float away.

By contrast, "Sixty Quests Begin," by James Fuhrman, isn't going anywhere. This small, semi-circular arrangement of densely packed steel wedges, embodies pure physical mass the same minimalist way Yin Yang symbolizes infinity.

Fuhrman, seemingly the only artist in the group to have picked the circle as the ideological starting point, complements the U shape with full circles in a set of meditative brush drawings he calls "Enso."

Three imposing, wall-sized paintings by Antonio Puri evoke a similar impulse, the urge to sit, stare and absorb what such mammoth gestures have to say.

Fiercely abstract, the paintings will yield as many different reactions as there are viewers. Their quality, however, is not likely to be disputed.

One is a giant red bull's-eye splashed with flames of red, green and white. Its opposite is a long canvas painted cool blue with darker blue circles. The composition, speckled with decorative beads and slightly rippled in places, resembles the still surface of a pond.

Rarely is there time in a busy schedule to pay a second or third visit to an exhibition. "Inner Circles," however, along with the tribute to Pennsylvania's own Alexander Calder, offer abstract visual experiences worth repeating if at all possible.

ZACHARY LEWIS: 255-8266 or [email protected]