Twenty-five years ago, Tom Parish began visiting Venice, Italy for one month a year, took photographs, and returned to Detroit to realize his painterly vision of the ancient city. Back in 1933, the year Parish was born, Chicago galleries were a likely place to find paintings on the subject of Venice and its Old World culture and romance. But don’t expect to see reflections of gondolas and magnificent palazzi shimmering on the sun-drenched lagoon, like Monet’s “Palazzo Dario” on view at the Art Institute. There still is plenty of atmosphere in Parish’s work, but it’s more like the gritty ambience of a modern Euro-crime television drama. It’s all a bit off-kilter, because with everything sinking, there’s no longer any such thing as a true, vertical line in Venetian architecture. As these paintings are so large (six-by-eight feet) and the space so deep, a viewer is immersed in the sometimes dark, always crumbling illusive and watery world, rather than kept at a dry and comfortable distance. Happily, the second floor of Gruen Galleries is just the right space to see a dozen of these large paintings, which become like windows looking down on the canals. You can feel the dampness and almost smell the gasoline fumes from the outboard motors. Sorry, no gondolas, and no people either, since this is a very private, personal vision that follows the program of surrealist cityscapes that Parish was painting back in 1980. You won’t find the civic pride of Gentile Bellini, the architectural vistas of Canaletto, the teeming urban life of Guardi, the spacious, romantic drama of JMW Turner, or the social vignettes of Singer Sargent, but what you will find is a sharp sense of time and place, and a very useful metaphor for growing old and lonely with dignity and grace. (Chris Miller)
Through July 2 at Gruen Galleries, 226 W. Superior
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