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Over the past decade, Mary Borgman has done one thing, and done it well: monumental, six-foot-high charcoal portraits of handsome, multi-ethnic young dudes, often with their shirts off, set against a glowing background. These are young adults in that exciting, though sometimes dangerous period of self-discovery before settling into the responsibilities of family and career, and the artist shares the thrill of staring into their emerging selves.

Each drawing is based upon a single photograph, selected from many others, taken under controlled conditions in her studio. So, why not just make sixty-foot photographic prints?  Why take two to four months to finish each charcoal drawing? One part of the answer is that photographic forms feel cold and factual, while drawn forms can be warm and alive. Another is that hundreds of hours of concentrated focus can give pieces a sense of overwhelming, leap-off-the-wall presence that a momentary shutter flick can never achieve. Although similar, each pose/personality presents a different challenge. Her second version of Kaveh Razani is one of the most compelling pieces she’s ever done. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeroen Nelemans

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Susan Giles’ site-specific sculpture of the unbuilt Calatrava tower, toppled over inside The Mission, is a model of something unrealized. Although it might refer to the economic crash that scuttled the plans for the building, Giles’ “Crumpled Spire,” deftly built of wood, rests gracefully in the space, echoing the shapes of the windows, lighting grids and setting off the tin ceiling. Downstairs in the basement project room is an alluring and incisive set of photographs by Jeroen Nelemans that look beautiful at first glance but quickly assert a complex critical project that eludes the more poetic sculpture, upstairs. Read the rest of this entry »

"368 S. Michigan," watercolor on cardboard

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David Lefkowitz’s exhibition, “Facilities and Grounds,” is a careful examination of the relationship between the natural world and the built environments we inhabit everyday. In his series of pristine watercolors on meticulously unfolded cardboard boxes, Lefkowitz depicts everything from grand views of a city, to sturdy-looking stone buildings, to airport terminals. The architecture, however, is completely nondescript; it seems to be no place in particular, just a sprawling expanse that could be any Midwestern city. Read the rest of this entry »

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After eighteen years of tending bar and driving a cab, Dmitry Samarov is finally receiving the attention he deserves, thanks to “Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab,” published by the University of Chicago Press.

Two non-gallery shows popped up last month, featuring his sports- and music-related illustrations and some nearly abstract paintings of tumultuous bookshelves. Now, Lloyd Dobler Gallery has brought together a few of his Hack stories along with the original artwork that accompanied them. But unlike Samarov’s spot-on observations of humanity, all of these exhibitions miss the real story, namely that Dmitry Samarov is an exceptional painter, especially of cityscapes and interior views. The two ink and wash drawings are the only evidence at Lloyd Dobler of the adept, inventive and inspirational work in many media that can be found on the artist’s websites. Read the rest of this entry »

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Postmodern wisdom holds that paintings used to be orgasmic—after all, pretty much everyone in those old harmonious oil tableaux used to share identical slackjawed expressions of rapt ecstasy, staring up like nomadic goatherds seeing their first airplane. And then modern art came along and made everything flat and serious and boring. But, while Ryan Travis Christian borrows his melted-plastic cartoon solids from Peter Saul, his soft dreamy atmospheres from Yves Tanguy, and his moire-pattern picture planes from Lari Pittman, the simple gesture of unifying everything with value—black and white, almost no gray—and contrast—hard outlines or uniformly blurred edges—somehow points out the counterintuitive exuberance of Cubism. Picasso, Braque, Christian—the images all look like an early silent film viewed through one of those prismatic lenses used to approximate insect vision. Read the rest of this entry »

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The collapse of the market for stippled illustration might have been the best thing that ever happened to William Harrison, even if it took him more than ten years to realize it. Up until the mid-nineties he made photo-realistic drawings of commercial products for companies like McDonald’s and Burger King. But then his fanatically precise technique of rendering objects with little black dots was replaced by computer software, and like so many other workers in a changing economy, he had to reinvent himself. It didn’t happen overnight, but eventually he discovered a talent for portraiture. The results are breathtaking, and it’s not all about the tiny black dots. He has a real feeling for character and design, as well as an uncommon ability to compose small forms over large ones, so although he shows dozens of tiny facial wrinkles, he doesn’t lose the volume of the head. That’s what masters like Jan van Eyck or Dirk Bouts were doing as they celebrated civic and religious life at the dawn of bourgeois civilization, and it’s no less enjoyable when Harrison applies it to the outlaw bikers of our age. Read the rest of this entry »

Amy Honchell

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As fiber-based artists Amy Honchell and Young Cho reveal in statements about their respective practices, their works are shot through with personal meanings and associations: Honchell recalls the mountainous Pennsylvania landscapes of her childhood, and Cho elaborates an intimate mythology revolving around a recurring imaginary character. But the private origins of the pieces in “Fictional Landscapes,” now up at Dominican University’s O’Connor Gallery, are given over to something immediately accessible to viewers, thanks in part to the manner in which both artists use narrative elements to solicit audience engagement.

In one series of drawings, Honchell creates studies in postindustrial abstraction that exhibit an insectile elegance, the dark lineaments of skeletal machineries contrasting with brightly colored backgrounds. “Murmur, Sigh, Whisper,” meanwhile, is a sophisticated gesture of childhood delight in which the artist shapes ultrafine glitter into a scintillating hill topped by an ethereal structure—a dreamy vision of shimmering, granular materiality. Cho’s precisely rendered pencil drawings are spare, delicate and minutely detailed. The childlike figure that inhabits them—an intimidated everyman whose face is always hidden—engages in private rituals of loneliness against a vacuous white background. Read the rest of this entry »

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In 1999, Janet McKenzie’s “Jesus of the People” was selected by Sister Wendy Beckett, the BBC television art docent, from among the ten finalists in the National Catholic Reporter’s “Jesus 2000” project to discover “who Jesus might be for our time.” As Sister Wendy wrote: “This is a haunting image of a peasant Jesus—dark, thick-lipped, looking out on us with ineffable dignity, with sadness but with confidence.”

Using a young African-American woman as the model and symbols associated with American Indian and Taoist spirituality, the piece has generated more controversy than veneration, which was presumably that independent newspaper’s intention. Read the rest of this entry »

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In the mid-1950s, Chicago was a center for magazine and book illustration, and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts was one of America’s leading commercial art schools. Drawn to that school and hoping for that kind of career, a young Canadian, Phillip Renaud  (1934-2011), traveled here from Edmonton, Alberta not far from the village where his father ran a trading post. In the following decades, he got that career, putting illustrations into Playboy magazine, among others, and various grade-school textbooks. But his sharp, crisp design and sparse, minimal figure drawing is possibly more the result of his study at the Art Center in Pasadena, and those are the qualities that stand out in the current retrospective at the Palette and Chisel Academy, where he has been a popular instructor over the past decade. Read the rest of this entry »

Santiago Talavera

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The mantra of “Nulla dies sine linea” (“Not one day without a line”) has inspired and motivated artists and writers for centuries as a reminder that an artist’s skill and a successful work of art must come from daily practice. Pliny the Elder penned the Latin proverb in ancient Rome, Anthony Trollope advised the phrase to aspiring writers in the nineteenth century and Whistler inscribed a drawing in his diary with the same line as a personal reminder.

At the Instituto Cervantes, Madrid-based gallerist Blanca Soto brings together twenty-three artists from Spain on the premise of this proverb, attempting to elevate the “underestimated art” of drawing and showcase contemporary Spanish works on paper. For such grandiose aims, the net cast is not very wide, for over half of the artists also happen to be represented by Galería Blanca Soto. “Nulla Dies Sine Linea” has a curatorial premise that is vague and flimsy, at best. The long halls and small gallery of the Spanish cultural center and language school are crowded with an overwhelming number of drawings that have little in common but an amateur hand and a questionable lineage from graphic street art. The drawings on display encompass a range from over the last decade, and strangely, Soto has chosen early, less confident works from artists like Sofía Jack who have matured more gracefully than is evident from this exhibition.

However, amidst the fray, conscientious diligence does make an appearance. Read the rest of this entry »