Thomas Chimes at Locks - Philadelphia

Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Anne R. Fabbri

"Faustroll Landscape," presenting portraits and landscapes from the 1980s by Thomas Chimes, was the third exhibition at the Locks Gallery documenting this artist's work from successive decades. Fourteen oil paintings on canvas--five portraits and nine landscapes--charted the course from the dark, sepia-toned portraits with which he ended the 1970s to the "white" paintings of the late 1980s. The show, titled by Chimes after his painting Faustroll/Landscape (1988), refers to Dr. Faustroll (Alfred Jarry's alter ego, whom Chimes has appropriated) taking a symbolic bicycle ride through Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, an odyssey of myth and memory.

Chimes began the 1980s with subtly colored images based on old photographs and childhood memories. Gradually he eliminated colors from both his landscapes and portraits, leaving only Mars black and titanium white under multiple layers of glaze, creating a blurred effect in a grayish-white field described by him as "emerging consciousness." His familiar portrait images of Erik Satie, Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Jarry began to reappear in soft blacks, layers of the background pared to reveal hidden lettering vaguely related to the subject depicted. During the course of the decade, his landscapes, here assembled for the first time, developed from Waterfall (1980), a somewhat romantic view of Niagara Falls in the American landscape tradition of Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church, to a series of white paintings based on a vague childhood memory of Memorial Hall in Philadelphia, Chimes's native city.

The fictionalized landscape of Memorial Hall is the setting for a transfiguration from the ordinary to something verging on the eternal. Memorial Hall (1981) begins the monochromatic series by depicting the Schuylkill River in the foreground, with a domed building dimly silhouetted on the horizon of the distant plateau. Six subsequent landscapes become successively more reductive, as both the fiver and the horizon are eliminated from view. In the painting And Behold the Wallpaper of Faustroll's Body Was Unrolled by the Saliva and by the Teeth of the Water (1983), Memorial Hall is a blurred image, dome or breast, emerging from a distant mist. O'Tell Me All about Anna Livia (1981-88) reduces the architectural element to a gray protuberance resembling a nipple. Its title, a passage from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, invokes the eroticism often present in Chimes's work. Etrange, n'estce pas? (1987), the last in the series, depicts only a subtle horizontal band of gray. By this time Chimes had stripped his art of all embellishment, paring it to the core, and was primed for a new agenda.