Southern sensibilities: the New Orleans Triennial revealed a regional penchant for painting and an uncommon lack of interest in high technology - Report From New Orleans

Art in America, Nov, 2001 by Frances Colpitt

Established in 1887, the New Orleans Triennial is the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States. This year's installment, organized last spring by then New Orleans Museum of Art assistant director William A. Fagaly, who now holds the post of part-time curator of African art, included 25 artists living and working in 12 southeastern states. Fagaly's unusual curatorial strategy involved soliciting nominations from 49 artists included in the last two Triennials. Each was asked to nominate three artists who had not been represented in previous Triennials. Based on the nominees' slides, Fagaly made 37 studio visits to select the final group. One "co-curator" (as Fagaly referred to the nominators), abstract painter Susie Rosmarin, saw all three of her artists included in the exhibition.

Typical of such surveys, the 2001 Triennial embraced a diverse array of styles, but it was distinguished by the fact that it represented what artists, rather than curators or critics, find interesting at the moment. Because there was no thematic mandate, it appeared almost anti-trendy. Electronic art was not well represented, and video and photography were not pervasive.

Greeting visitors to the show was a collaborative piece by New Orleans artist Sharon Jacques and the art students of the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. The Wall Project: The Opening, began as a wall simply papered with commercially printed wallpaper. Then the students smashed through it with hammers, providing a visual aperture at the entrance to the exhibition. The metaphor of "breakthrough" was legible, although somewhat misleading in the context of this exhibition.

Painting came off best, taking two primary directions: reductive abstraction and figurative work characterized by a dispassionate folksiness. Among the most impressive representatives of the former were Annette Cone-Skelton's shimmering grids of paint, graphite and liquid rust on canvas or paper. In their use of the grid, subdued color and delicate, repetitive marks, the paintings of Cone-Skelton, who lives in Atlanta, recall those of Max Cole and Mary Corse. The largest of her works, an untitled piece from 2000, just over 5 feet square, is a. checkerboard of horizontal and vertical pencil lines on a black ground. The graphite picks up light differently, depending on the lines' orientation and closeness to one another. In a work on paper, the use of liquid rust applied to a tiny grid produces a more static and absorbing image.

Eschewing meditative subtlety, Aaron Parazette's paintings are bold and quickly read, encouraging the viewer to linger only over the thin, fluorescent-hued outlines of his broad or attenuated elliptical shapes. Derived from his earlier paintings of layered or interwoven shapes based on clip-art splats, the "Detail" series (2001) provides complex patterns of positive and negative elliptical forms in glossy, artificial colors. The compositions are truncated at the canvas edges, but are grounded by the highly controlled brushwork that fills in the crisply delineated forms. Francesca Fuchs, who like Parazette is from Houston, takes this brand of nongestural facture to the point of anonymity in her three large, rectangular paintings based on printed bed-sheet designs from the 1960s and '70s. In nostalgic hues of pink, green and brown, her canvases sport allover patterns of flowers, bamboo shoots or stripes, laid down with an astonishingly mechanical hand.

In contrast, the sensuous surfaces of Andrea Caillouet's two small-scale beeswax wall pieces are more materially indulgent and personal, with a physical rather than intellectual relationship to the viewer. A conceptual dimension arises from Caillouet's addition of words (Sticky, Taxi, Sugar Daddy and Naughty Rose, Nude Scene, both 1999) imprinted in the surfaces of her monochrome canvases, which are shown in multipaneled groups. This San Antonio artist also showed a video, Skating Alone (2000), a dizzying record of the artist's rollerskate-shod foot (shot downward from her waist) zooming around a roller-disco rink. While Skating Alone was one of few exceptions to the general scarcity of high-tech work, its homemade quality allowed it to mesh well with the other pieces.

Houston artist Joe Mancuso is well known for his abstract paintings and sculptures which allude to processes of building and construction. In Sample Series: Ivory, Burgundy, Slate, Amber, Ebony, Tahoe (2000), a low-relief floral wallpaper pattern was cast into the surfaces of six square panels of pigmented concrete. Accompanying this work was Screen (2001), in dusty charcoal on newspaper mounted on the wall. Extending 12 by 15 feet, the charcoal grid pattern of circles recalls a massive wall of decorative cinder blocks, although the piece itself is hauntingly ephemeral.

Among the most impressive figurative paintings were the works of Carlos de Villasante, who was born in Mexico City and lives in Coral Gables, Fla. His highly stylized, almost cartoonish depictions of single or multiple figures are characterized by a deft command of line and an acute balance of raw canvas and flat shapes--filled either with paint or cut-out sections of patterned wallpaper. A serf-portrait of the shirtless artist in a contemplative pose is included in each work. The gracefulness of the elongated figure's gesture is complemented by a breezy, delicate palette.