Anita Soos
You can have your world falling apart in hot, agonizing slow melts and drips.
Or in an excess of helixes and the soul-less forms of order.
A fascinating show for the plane-and-trainwreck dog days of our global warming summer seems to offer those choices.
They arrive in the interestingly contrasted work of artists Anita Soos and Ken Lovell.
Soos’s oil monotypes and Lovell’s digital prints are on display in the Arts Council’s appropriately single-corridored Gallery 195 space on the fourth floor of First Niagara Bank, aka Gallery 195, at 195 Church St.
It’s worth putting on your coolest sunglasses and going to have a look. The aesthetic apocalypse is viewable during banking hours through Sept. 20, with an artists’ reception on Sept. 10 from 5 to 7:00 p.m.
Soos’s melting red and blue oils ooze down in long niagaras of color and give a sense that the multicolored wax of the world has just about reached bottom.
Even though there are cooler colors in the dozen works of hers that line the corridor, the melt proceeds in all the work on display. Here and there in splotches of yellow discrete and standing apart from the melt, she suggests other worlds just might be out there as long as we Icaruses don’t push the limits once again.
Hey, seize the hope anywhere you find it.
Across the narrow hall, Lovell delivers a kind of double-helix double whammy of too much geometry, a kind of aesthetic dizzyness. His works, especially as they are grouped in threes, suggest the mathematical basis of the cells or synapses of my brain, all nearly identical, yet minutely different. Or at least I hope so.
Ken Lovell
Occasionally an image arises from the circles and the geometries, nosing out of the picture border and suggesting a shnoz or cartoon character or a dog bone. His digital, binary-style creates a strong longing for the human.
When it emerges in a corner here or there, it almost puts a smile on your face.
These artists have been paired together because they “both create abstract rhythms through the use of color, texture,and pattern,” writes Debbie Hesse, the organizer of the show and the Arts Council’s director of artistic services and programs.
That’s putting it mildly.
Perhaps it’s the juxtaposition of the two styles or the beloved claustrophobia of Gallery 195. Or the anxieties one brings to art this summer including, as in religion, the hope for hope, or at lest some amelioration. Or all of the above.
The result: I found myself feeling strangely relieved as if the secret were finally out thanks to these two visual practitioners: We are destroying ourselves by passion or neglect, as in the famous alternatives Robert Frost laid out in his lyric “Fire and Ice.”
Perhaps I bring too much to this show, with Soos’s melting waterfalls of passionate color and Lovell’s cerebral machinery of our potential self-demise. Still, I’ll take this true stuff any day to the anemic anodyne of summer reading.
