Reflections on Mortality

Barney Reid died earlier this year at the age of 78. He had already agreed to show his prints at the David Zapf Gallery this summer, but now the exhibition has taken on the quality of a memorial, a mini-retrospective of the local artist’s output.

“One Hundred Prints by Barney M. Reid” surveys the artist’s work from the late 1970s, when he devoted himself exclusively to printmaking, though to his last etching, made in January of this year. Because of his recent death, Reid’s reflections on mortality become all the more poignant and his allegorical images of man wrestling with the angel of death gain an even more bittersweet edge.

The air of death pervades much of his work of the last decade, in fact, whether or not he directly addresses the subject. Ravens hover over bodies soon to be corpses and a bleak, apocalyptic pall hangs over many a scene. Yet there is another side to Reid’s work that is unabashedly pleasant. His simple studies of the Southwest desert landscape have a quiet, attractive appeal. Their almost folksy innocence brings to mind the regionalist images of Grant Wood, one of Reid’s teachers at the University of Iowa.

The disarming contrast between these straightforward, sometimes quaint landscapes and the undercurrent of the macabre that flavors so many other prints ultimately works in Reid’s favor. It gives his oeuvre a range, a depth and a quality of the unexpected that proves intriguing. Adding to the intrigue is the scale of these prints--most measure only a few inches per side and all are executed with a precise, delicate touch. They are endearing, if not for the beauty of the desert landscapes Reid portrays, then for the fact that he never sensationalizes the grotesque or violent.

The integrity of Reid’s figures is never at stake, even when they are losing the battle against age, sickness and cruel fate. The young man who struggles with the shrouded angel of death may be succumbing to the angel’s lethal kiss, but he dies a beautiful death, free of physical decay. The crippled men, too, who stand on crutches among the healthy, lose none of their dignity by contrast. They simply embody a different way of being, equally viable, equally legitimate. Reid’s cast of characters also includes dwarfs walking on stilts, waltzing with a dog or merely standing among others of more conventional size.

In all of these works, Reid displays an empathy toward the disenfranchised, those on the physical fringe of society. He looks humbly upon them, neither exploiting nor glorifying them, but subjecting them to the same engaging, wry humor as the rest of the mortal bunch.

Only in works like “Veteran,” or his series on environmental destruction does Reid purposely empower the weak by charging them with great symbolic import. In “Veteran,” a half-uniformed man with gaunt face and bandaged eyes hobbles forward with two sticks for assistance. He emerges from a shallow, shadowed space, his pitiable condition offset, presumably, by the glory of the medals he wears. It’s a pungent anti-war statement that rivals the brutally critical prints made by German artists George Grosz and Otto Dix following World War I.

More often, Reid’s figures are unclothed--timeless, universal citizens, naked and vulnerable to their own foibles and faults. Those in “Another World (The Pollution Series),” for instance, forage through a landscape made stingy by man’s own selfish disregard. As always, large, dark crows lay in wait as the figures migrate toward the next calamity, or finally, their own death.

We are all criminals in this polluted world, but Reid also pays homage to the kindness that surfaces in the face of danger. His group of “Samaritan” prints eases the despair evoked by the pollution series with a glimmer of optimism and perhaps even faith in basic human goodness. On balance, Reid’s world is a good one--we are the ones who fade its glory with our struggles against ourselves, each other and the natural course of things.

* David Zapf Gallery, 2400 Kettner Blvd., through Aug.1. Gallery hours are noon-5 p.m. Friday and Saturday and by appointment (232-5004).

ART NOTES

San Diego artists on the move include: Carol Nye, whose proposal for a public art project can be seen through July 30 at the Merging One Gallery in Santa Monica; Ellen Phillips, whose sculpture is on view through July 24 in Burbank at the Creative Arts Center Gallery, and the collaborative team of Deborah Small, Elizabeth Sisco, Scott Kessler, Louis Hock and David Avalos, who are participating in the show “Travel Documents,” at Camerawork in San Francisco (July 17-Aug. 22).