Day 351 - "SSO"

June 29, 2023

Gallery 920 is home to six large wall panels employing different media, as well as to a sculpture by David Smith. All merit and receive my attention, I decide - although I now wonder if I would have had the same reaction to many, many other works if I had taken care to look at them more closely.

 

One of the items that first grabs me is a relatively early (1961) work by Andy Warhol  called "Before and After 1" which juxtaposes two large profiles of a woman, drawn in comic-book fashion. In one profile, the woman has a hook nose, in the other a button nose, and you realize with a bit of shock that the event to which the title refers is the subject's nose job. A second Warhol work, "Nine Jackies," is a silkscreen showing, in a 3 X 3 matrix, nine images of Jackie Kennedy,  based on a photo clearly taken November 22,  1963, since Jackie is wearing that famous pillbox hat. It's interesting to see the way that President Kennedy's face moves into and out of focus in the various iterations of the silkscreening process. A work by Claes Oldenburg, "Soft Calendar for the Month of August," shows, mounted on a panel, the numbers from 1 to 31 formed out of foam rubber, arranged in five rows  and painted with red and white acrylic paint. The numbers look squishy and organic - like intestines, perhaps, or, in the case of the number 1, like a penis.Weird and imaginative and funny.  I don't much like the David Smith sculpture, called "Tanktotem" but it's interesting for its incorporation of machine parts. And there's a Jasper Johns flag painting, worked in oil, newsprint, charcoal and encaustic. The last, I learn, is a kind of wax painting that allows the surface to be built up above the canvas. 

I can't tear myself away from a Salvador Dali painting called "Madonna," and, from the looks of it, many other visitors to the gallery are similarly captivated by the work. From a distance, it appears that Dali has painted, in black and white, a grossly enlarged human ear covered with white dots of various sizes. Only when you keep looking does the Raphael-like image of the madonna, her head covered with a mantle, 

emerge from the ear cavity. Two pieces of paper appear to be suspended from the surface of the painting, but they are a triumph of trompe l'oeil.   The work gives me new respect not only for Dali's imagination but for his sheer ability as a draftsman.     

Today's work, entitled "SSO"  is a large painting (measuring approximately seven feet wide and five feet high) by an artist I've never heard  of before, Allan D'Arcangelo, whose dates were 1930-1998.  Against a dark ground (presumably representing a night scene), the work shows in sharp detail just three images: a red, white, and blue "Esso" gas sign (whose first letter has been cut off, however); a road with a white divider that recedes into the distance; and a road sign for U.S. 23. I look it up; the highway is a major artery running from Jacksonville, FL to Mackinaw City, Michigan. In the dark background, other shapes dimly emerge: the left side of the road appears to be is flanked by trees, while it's not clear whether the rounded shape topping tall poles at the right represents another stand of trees or, as I would guess, an oil storage tank. If the latter, the painting can be read as a rather grim picture of the takeover of the American landscape by Big Oil.