During the heyday of postmodernism in the 1980s, art writers often
invoked nature and culture. The natural world, according to this
thinking, was becoming irrelevant, as Americans spent more and more
time staring into glass screens and windshields; in the postindustrial
Information Age, the mediasphere would be the new reality. Deregulation
and privatization dominated public discourse in the age of talk radio,
and the political left retreated into its ivory towers, comforting
itself with sour-grapes theory (nothing is real!), navel-gazing
identity politics (dead white males don’t fool us!) and calculated
irreverence (religious/patriotic imagery + nasty materials). Too often,
what emerged was a deliberately abstruse, self-referential art that
winked at its own emptiness; in some extreme cases, there was almost
nothing to look at. Now, après la deluge, we’re more
subdued and thoughtful, so it’s a good time to rediscover the pleasures
of looking. The colorful paintings of Lisa Beerntsen and Tony
Speirs, deriving from nature-based abstraction and
mass-culture-based pop, respectively, reward both casual viewing and
extended looking — and there’s plenty to see.
Beerntsen’s acrylics on canvas and mixed-media collages on board
depict clusters of flowers, tendrils, roots, fronds, pods, seeds, and
spores in a kind of paean to germination and growth. Scale is
subjective here, with tiny spores and massive blossoms rendered at
roughly equivalent sizes. Beerntsen also takes liberties with space,
employing the nonperspectival, flat, shallow relief space of Abstract
Expressionism, which here suggests microscope or telescope views with
entities tiny or vast drifting in and out. But it’s the color of these
works that makes them sing. In “Sprung,” for example, the overall
golden tonality in enlivened by gray-blue, green, and orange patterned
disks that inevitably suggest fruits and spices. Some of the collages
achieve a poetic allusiveness far beyond their modest scale,
transcending even the lyricism of the quite successful larger
botanicals.
Speirs’ acrylic paintings on panel blend pop surrealism and
commercial nostalgia to create an alternate universe somewhere between
the impish Walt Disney and the perverse R. Crumb. Motifs from 1940s and
1950s illustration and cartooning (the androgynous Speedy Alka Seltzer;
Bugs Bunny waterskiing atop a WWII twin-fuselage P-38 fighter plane;
gartered legs; a beckoning Tastee-Freez ice-cream cone; the Morton Salt
girl; Monopoly’s Rich Uncle Pennybags; and various big-eyed
anime-style characters, including a lady bumblebee in the Betty
Boop vein) are mixed with wallpaper patterns, postcard signage, and
Chinese characters in a multitemporal cross-cultural mashup. Through
June 26 at Kuhl Frames + Art (412 22nd St., Oakland). KuhlFrames.com or 510-625-0123