Blue Door Opens New Artistic Worlds

Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s winding and cavernous Carceri, reimagined and rendered in bright watercolor for the year 2015. The late New Haven Coliseum, captured gracefully in stages of its demolition. Floating, torso-less anuses blooming into dahlias. A fantasy plane of strings and one blown-up, unattached molar, suspended in a universe that is not quite of this world or the next.

Hurtling through time and space, these images — drawings, watercolors, and one oil painting by New England artists Victor Agran and Todd Stong, on exhibit at The Blue Door on Greene Street — seem at first utterly disparate, yoked by happy coincidence at best. Agran’s works engage physical, deeply articulated architectural spaces. Stong’s float unattached, tethered loosely to reality by the occasional reference to modern-day medicine or material culture. A closer look, however, and their unifying elements reveal themselves. They are all fantasyscapes that subvert fantasy, stroke by stroke.

Artist, art historian and critic at the Yale School of Art and Lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design, Jonathan Weinberg has curated a small but formidable show of Agran’s and Stong’s pieces, up through early June. The exhibition focuses on the interplay of what Weinberg calls ​“fantasies,” despite their basis in the seen world.

The two artists are both inspired by Michel Foucault’s ​“Of Other Spaces: Utopia and Heterotopia.” They were drawn to conveying, as Foucault writes in his essay, ​“real places that do exist that are formed in the very founding of society — which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”

Agran, who teaches at the Yale School of Architecture, is most interested in physical or would-be physical sites that are deceptively complex: New York’s piers, the Coliseum in its stages of dissolution, and 3D models of spatial drawings. But for him, it always comes back to one certain Italian draughtsman, who he sees as the founding father of modern architectural practice: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and his drawings of classicized fantasy prisons.

“There’s a dialogue that happens between drawings,” Agran said recently at the opening to the exhibition. ​“With these, I was thinking about Piranesi, but I was also thinking about de Stijl and Constructivism and things like that.” But ​“Piranesi is the thesis — with him, there’s the complex space, the light and shadow, the mood or psychological space of it. There’s this fallow period when architects aren’t building and they draw … Zaha Hadid, Super Studio … drawing as a means of ideas. Piranesi was the progenitor of that.”

The emphasis on drawing as doing carries over to Stong’s work too. A recent graduate of Brown University, the artist is tied to aspects of the seen world — in this case, the HIV/AIDS crisis, of which he feels acutely aware as a young gay man — but goes far beyond them in his new pen and ink drawings, which channel very mature themes with a childlike leitmotif. Having started a body of work based on Weinberg’s home-grown dahlias, Stong is interesting in bringing his images into a queer space that is itself governed by the definition, if not also laws, of Foucault’s heterotopias. 

“Prior to this, I had done these sort of automatic compositions, that had very linear, robotic things coming out … it was this kind of child-like, post-apocalyptic attempt at recreating utopia or something like that. The narrative that I had been creating was sort of like Wall‑E … and it led to this crazy narrative that was my senior thesis show. These are a continuation of that,” he said at the opening, lovingly pointing out what he calls his ​“mutated anus flowers” to friends who had gathered at the house. 

Spread over two rooms, the works converse wildly with each other. There is frivolity and cataclysm, fantasy and fiction, and psychological distress that intrigues but does not overwhelm.

“They are both artists of dreamscapes that no matter what the underlying anxieties they express never feel like nightmares given the beauty and coherence of their form,” Weinberg wrote in a curator’s statement. ​“To look closely at their pictures, and to follow the paths of their lines and marks is like taking a journey and getting a bit lost, knowing all along that you will find your way back home eventually.”

The Blue Door is open by appointment only. To view the show, call (203) 507‑2649 or email [email protected].