Art Adds Spice To Soup

In chain-store Singapore, where she had been teaching for a year, Jessica Hanser dearly missed being able to go to independent local coffee shops where she could hang out and enjoy not only the culinary fare, but also the local artists the small businesses helped to support.

On her first day back and out and about in New Haven, Hanser thus hit the jackpot at Atticus Bookstore and Cafe on Chapel Street.

There, on a recent morning, she was enjoying the black bean soup and the large painterly works of Peruvian-American artist Carlos Arteaga in his new show, Checks.

When art is displayed in coffee shops — an increasingly utilized venue in town — the images are frequently modestly sized, and in the battle between paintings and panini for eater-viewer attention, the belly normally prevails over the eyeball.

Not so here. Arteaga, a Connecticut-born artist with a studio in Brooklyn, displays a love for bigness and thick paint in seven large paint and mixed media works, a suite of three small ones, and two works on unframed mylar — a new frontier for him — that more than fill up the south wall of the eatery, and a section of the north wall by the smaller tables.

It’s not only the size of the paintings that gives Arteaga’s work a certain visual aggression. There’s lots of paint too, put on in thick impasto, layered and layered, with echoes of paint-by-the-gallon forbears like Hans Hoffman and Jackson Pollock. Like them, here too the artist’s brush is showing, and proudly, in all kinds of different trails left across the canvases.

In ​“From the Gut,” a mixed media concoction beneath which Hanser was enjoying her soup and half sandwich, there are also layers of tissue paper, painted over in yellow, and then perhaps even dabs of more paper added, with more paint on them.

The use of paint along with collage is of course not new — Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso were doing it at the dawn of Cubism — but that doesn’t matter. Art should not be always measured by how much novelty it engages.

Arteaga’s work has energy and verve and you can infer a palpable pleasure in the making that all come through, like the pleasure in eating a good bowl of hot soup or a tasty panini. The work feels hearty, and it certainly pleased Hanser.

“I’m taking advantage of the coffee shops [in New Haven],” she said, explaining that she has just returned from teaching British history at Yale-National Singapore University for the last year. Singapore, she explained, ​“has mostly chains. It’s very hard to find an Atticus in Singapore, especially around the university,” she said.

Then she pointed to ​“From the Gut,” above her table, where she noticed piece of printed paper that Arteaga had tucked into the right bottom corner of the canvas. ​“He even has a boarding slip,” she said, pointing to a black and white piece of paper with a kind of barcode over which Arteaga had painted, but left the code visible.

“I spend a lot of time flying. I spot them,” she said of the slips. ​“A lot of my bookmarks are boarding slips.”

The waitress serving Hanser said that during the first week the paintings have been on the wall, the general response has been admiration. ​“People want to know who the artist is,” she said.

Arteaga, who has recently shown works at the Art Students League in Manhattan and at galleries in Brooklyn, likes the idea of showing his work in a coffee shop. ​“As an artist, I always look forward to showing my work and starting/continuing a dialogue with the local community,” he wrote in an email.

He also loves paint, he added. ​“All of my work is mostly a derivative of paint — watching paint dry, other people’s paintings, my ink paintings, cake frosting, which to me is technically painting impasto style with buttery airy sugar on top of baked bread, spilled paint, painting, from life, etc.”

Is it any wonder that an artist who compares his paint to frosting on a cake has a show flourishing at a coffee shop?

Carlos Arteaga’s paintings are on view now at Atticus Bookstore and Cafe, 1082 Chapel St.