A Pulsating Rhythm for Women, Buildings

Women and the sea, women and the Earth, women with animals or children have long been common themes in art, the female sex bound innately, it seems, with the organic and natural. But a link between women and constructed reality is equally viable, and Virginia Patrone is one of the few contemporary painters to draw the comparison on a sensual and spiritual basis.

In her phantasmagoric scenes, now on view at the Linda Moore Gallery, she bestows women and buildings alike with a full-bodied sensuality. Both are nude--the women in a conventional sense, undressed, and the buildings by being stripped of their stern, imposing geometries. Painted with a restless brush full of intense greens, fuchsias and violets, both women and buildings seem to breathe, their skins gently rippling with the pulse of life.

Patrone favors the old, Colonial-style structures of her native Montevideo, Uruguay, the massive, ornate buildings that once served as hotels and headquarters. Now abandoned, the buildings stand as empty relics of a bygone era, dignified but obsolete. Patrone humanizes them, rendering their monumentality accessible by drenching them in soft light and hot color. Though made of stone, they feel fluid, animate.

In “Maternidad y Hotel Colon” (Motherhood and Hotel Colon), Patrone pairs a large, hovering maternal spirit, her breasts swollen with milk, with an elegant old building. Both offer security, shelter, solace. The Hotel Colon appears in several other paintings as well, unaccompanied. These images, like character studies, show the building’s many faces--melancholy, proud, wild.

Patrone’s emotional palette feels overwrought at times, as do the extreme gestures and expressions of some of her figures, such as the garish, contorted woman in “Las Noches de Scherezada” (The Nights of Scherzando). In other images, though, the faces and postures can be wrenching. The lone woman in “Ticket to Paradise,” for instance, is a dreamy violet from head to toe, and she wraps her arms and legs tightly around her twisting trunk. With her eyes closed and mouth open, her face is a mysterious mixture of self-absorbed ecstasy and anguish.

“La Decision de Lauro” (Lauro’s Decision), too, achieves emotional power through nuance rather than excess. Two figures, nearly mirror images of one another, sit on opposite sides of a small table, their long, bony fingers clasped together. Both stare out of the picture, toward the viewer, gaunt and imploring. Lauro’s “decision,” whatever it may be, is clearly a grave matter, well characterized by the composition’s split structure.

Patrone’s show, titled “Lo Maravilloso” (The Fantastic), is accompanied by a beautifully designed catalogue with a brief essay by the director of Montevideo’s national museum.

* Linda Moore Gallery, 1611 W. Lewis St., through June 29. The gallery is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. weekdays, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday.

Debris is hardly an enticing description for a body of sculpture, but Tom Driscoll injects new, poetic meaning into the term. His cast-concrete objects, on view with the work of Gary David Ghirardi at the Rita Dean Gallery, are oddly plain, scattered forms with a surprising elegance and eloquence.

Driscoll’s “New Castings and Debris” hang from the ceiling, lean against the wall or seem to emerge from it. Mostly pure, elemental shapes such as circles and pendulous cones, the sculptures have a sensuousness and richness not commonly associated with concrete. The material’s industrial character, in fact, gives these works an earnestness that complements well their more seductive side. They are down to earth--and the earth, these days, is carpeted in concrete.

“Remnant,” one of the most evocative works on view, consists of a simple arch of rebar partly embedded in concrete. Mounted vertically on the wall, it reads as a spine, the graceful backbone of a 20th-Century industrial giant.

Driscoll’s work treads a fine line between contemporaneity and antiquity: his materials are of the present, his shapes of a timeless past. That ambiguity is articulated precisely in the title of another work, “Somewhere Between Native and Nasa,” a large, open vessel suspended at eye level.

Driscoll, a local artist, has an uncanny ability to draw rich, varied textures from a material as gray and mundane as concrete. Gary Ghirardi is also well-known locally for his cast-concrete panels with inset imagery and textural imprints, but here he exhibits only drawings. His series of four graphite drawings bears the inflammatory title of “Gendersmear,” though the images themselves feel somewhat innocuous.

Two of them feature a generalized female form reminiscent of the figurine bottles of a popular pancake syrup. In “Stretching Progenitor,” the woman’s neck is attenuated far out of proportion to her body. In “Racist Progenitor,” Ghirardi enlarges the figure to greater than life-size. Two other images feature subjects more commonly associated with men--a spear and a bomb.

Ghirardi, as always, can conjure a raw, striking image out of very little apparent subject matter. The sheer surface appeal of his concrete works can usually compensate when his meaning is hard to decipher, but these drawings haven’t nearly the same weight, literal or figurative.

* Rita Dean Gallery, 544 6th Ave., through June 28. Gallery hours are 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday.

ART NOTES

Local sculptor and public artist Ellen Phillips is represented in the exhibition, “Concepts/Contemporary Outdoor Sculpture Proposals,” now at the West Bend Gallery of Fine Arts in Wisconsin.