New Haven Independent

The young former graffiti artist was showing what he called, with pride, his “low brow” art for the very first time in a group show with six other area artists exhibiting a wide range of more legit media from old fashioned paintings on canvas to artists’ books to digital prints.

En Masse, curated by Suzan Shutan, runs through Jan. 9 at the Arts Council of Greater New Haven’s Small Space Gallery, 70 Audubon St., 2nd floor.

Lorenzo and a number of the other artists in the show were on hand at the opening reception to talk about worms and how, in the words of curator Shutan, “they are bucking convention, and work with such conviction with their materials and their technique” that they represent a kind of ensemble of soloists exploring the borders of their genres.

The result is a show without an obvious theme, but one where, as one guest was overheard to say, seven people are in a room having a robust conversation that just happens to be visual.

Lorenzo loves his worms: “They are very fluid, and, of course, they also remind me of a farewell to the flesh,” which one guesses is a reasonable stance for risky skateboarding. Shutan included Lorenzo in the show because he worked his graffiti on legal walls in the 1990s; then turned to t-shirt design. Now he’s pushed street-type art to where it fits in more conventional forms on a gallery wall without losing, curator and artist agree, any of the color or spray paint verve.

John Favret’s acrylic on canvas painting, on the other hand, is what he calls neo-expressionist, 19th century German Expressionism pushed to American cities’ rotting cores. He says he was a suburban Boston kid in the 1980s on a bus on his way in to see a Picasso show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. At the time he was painting but having trouble with what he called content, expressing himself. “The bus was moving slowly through the Bronx, and I saw all this wild decay. It was a time when real estate people were painting pictures of people on the sides of shot out buildings to give the impression of habitation.”

Five years afterwards this painting came to him in deep memory, and it was a breakthrough. Using dramatic broad colors and in-your-face perspective-breaking vistas, Favret went on to make a career for himself doing scenes of New York City. This painting, simply called “The Bronx,” changed Favret’s life and his art, he says.

Favret is one of several artists in the show who now teach at Housatonic Community College in Norwalk, where Shutan is also an instructor, in sculpture.

One of the most amusing artists wasn’t present. New Havener Elise Wiener, who was absent observing the Jewish Sabbath, makes artists’ books, but they were certainly not at rest at the Small Space Gallery. Shutan and visitors like Kyle Pederson picked up Wiener’s work, this one titled “I Am Simply Not Interested in the World.” However, inside were entertaining, life-affirming pages — such as a brief treatise on just how an ostrich puts its head in the sand, or an insurance policy issued by the “Omnipotent and Merciful Presence Who Presides Over Me” — which belie the book’s title.

“Many people who make artist books,” said Shutan, “make pages by hand and then scan them into the computer for mass production. Elise reverses it, taking what the computer creates and then turning that into one-of-a-kind objects all by hand.”

Jeanne Criscola, creator of a successful graphic design business in North Haven, herself has a few Marxist things to say about work done by hand, or not, thanks to the metaphor of the computer.

She was showing 17 of 64 digital prints from a room-size installation soon to be on view in Milan, Italy. “My work,” she says, “explores the computer as metaphor. There’s really nothing there but code, a representation, and we are using words like “trash can” and “office,” hundred year old terms for what we are doing, which is merely messing with code.” All the electronic bells and whistles distance us from that core reality.

These prints have as their centerpieces words, some benign such as “file” or “copy” but others such as “kill,” “burn,” or “slave.” None of the words and icons, she insists, are real. A slave drive, by the way, backs up a master drive, but what’s going on in the computer is simply code, thus we are alienated from what we are doing, to our, she suggests, considerable spiritual peril.

The other artists exhibiting include Ron Abbe, Irene Miller, and Deborah Zervas, a landscape designer who says she has always found traditional presentation drawings and elevations limiting; she’s created collages full of tactility and a sense of topography and layered geological processes.

In other words, a lot going on in an intimate space, which is a fair description of En Masse as a whole. The Small Space Gallery hours are Monday to Friday 9 to 5, and the works are for sale, although Favret says he’ll never part with “The Bronx.”