Minimalist by nature, collaborative by design
By Cate McQuaid Globe Correspondent / February 24, 2010
For August Ventimiglia, beauty is a byproduct. He’s a process artist. He sets up experiments, and his drawings, paintings, and sculpture at Judi Rotenberg Gallery are, in one sense, just traces of those experiments. That doesn’t mean Ventimiglia isn’t keenly aware of how they look – they’re gorgeous, velvety, simple, explosive. But unlike a painter with a brush considering every stroke, this artist steps back and invites chance to collaborate.
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Ventimiglia, whose work can also be seen now in the 2010 DeCordova Biennial, here pares his palette down to black and white, which imbues his work with a Zen-like rigor. “Crossing Over,’’ a 20-foot-long wall drawing, is the show-stopper, unfortunately obscured by two of the gallery’s architectural support columns. It’s a snap-line chalk drawing, made by holding a chalk-coated cord taut and snapping it against the wall. The resulting line is straight, and the chalk flies and drifts around it.
Here Ventimiglia made hundreds of lines, all crossing the 20-foot span in a dense, powdery black point at the center and fanning out on the sides. The drawing is precise but breathy, full of motion; the lines vibrate like strummed harp strings.
“Heat’’ is a simple oval drawn in charcoal on paper, over a period of 50 minutes. It lies flat, thick with built-up powder along the outside. Along the inside, the blackness of the drawing reveals the arduousness of the process. In sheer repetition, Ventimiglia captures something at once soft and hard, and almost alive. In what seems like tedium, we find revelation.
Daniel Alcalá’s drawings in the front room at Rotenberg make a great match for Ventimiglia’s work. Alcalá’s execution is equally ferocious. He covers paper in graphite so thick it gleams, then cuts wildly delicate silhouettes – construction landscapes threaded with cranes, as in the layered “City Constructors,’’ and slightly more pastoral landscapes that feature, according to gallery staff, cell towers disguised as trees, scruffy and strange in perfect verticality.
Kinetic sculptor George Sherwood crafts undulating steel vines that twist elegantly in the wind, such as “Botanica,’’ his 35-foot tall sculpture on the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway. He has smaller pieces like that in his show at Boston Sculptors Gallery, finely wrought and suited to public parks, with their nature motifs and tame beauty.
But they don’t have the playfulness and inventive wit of his two 8-foot-tall “Steel Life’’ sculptures. Each is a face, comprising scores of stainless steel polygons, which float on hooks attached to a gridded backing. They look like mosaics. Then a breeze comes through – in the gallery, provided by a fan – and the little steel shards waffle in the wind, rippling light over the large faces like a fast-moving sun. These are no less suited to parks, and they’re conceptually sharper and more engaging than the twisting vines.
