By Laura Stewart Fine Arts Writer More than any exhibit in recent memory, Maitland Art Center's supurb "Vessels/Visage" deals with art's essentials. The 32 paintings and prints by noted New Smyrna Beach artist Harold Garde stand out like glowing gems in the center's small galleries, their formal elements brilliantly spot-lit. In the densely worked heart of "RE Peat," subtle patches of cobalt gleam. They add rich, undefined dimensions to a canvas whose back-to-back, starkly outlined faces hint at an unresolved psychic resonance. Nearby in the tiny end gallery at Maitland is "Ech Oh," a painting whose playful title may hint at distant voices or repeated portraits - or, just as possible in Garde's fine, very thoughtful body of new work, not. What is certain about "Ech Oh," is that it stands out in "Vessels/Visages." Instead of emphasizing art's basics - contour, color, form - Garde built up soft, gauzy layers of flesh tones over raw, roughened canvas to suggest topics that can't be expressed in solid form. The main image in "Ech Oh" is a man's face, blurred at the edge so that it gives the impression of being either a distorted profile or a full-face study abandoned half way through. Indeed, the sense of interrupted intention pervades Garde's works at the center, lending an air of mystery that stands in tnese contrast to the intense primary colors or, in complete contrast, elegant black-gray-white palette of its seemingly simple, even artless works. It's just that tension, that tug between polar opposites, that grabs the eye and grips the imagination in "Vessels/Visages." Garde, now an august 80, is a powerful, if rather genial and enigmatic force on the Central Florida art scene. He divides his time between homes in New Smyrna Beach and Maine, exhibits widely and continues to narrow the focus that, for the past decade, has led closer and closer to pure self-expression in his prints and paintings, It's as if Garde peels back the membrane over daily life in his work, very gently but inexorably. What he finds, and shares with his viewers, is thepulsing sense of consciousness itself - the perseptions that make the wider world accessible to an individual. With such an intangible subject, Garde faces a tremendous task: putting his vision into solid form, and making it more that an abstract statement. In his latest works, he has chosen a vehicle with immense implications. Vessels are simple jars, vases, bottles - the utilitarian forms that are made to contain something, and are everywhere. Do a little mental tap dance, allow yourself a little visual pun, and the human form also can become a container - of the soul, the devine spark that animates mankind. But painting, or capturing it in the form of a print, is another matter. Garde began grappling with it years ago, and is constantly refining his vocabulary. Now, in works like the sublimely elliptical series of mundane, monochromatic vessels that form a series - "Vessels One Pink," "Large Pitcher," "Alone" and the magnificent "Vessels 3" - he has reached new heights. Unlike the breathtaking "Yellow Vase," with its electric reds, blues and greens, or the Francis Bacon-infected "Self Portrait as a Stranger," the four vessels that hang in a row at Maitland are nothing short of revelatory. Brightly lit in a dramatically dark gallery, understated in their shades of grey and roughly incised lines, the vessel series says it all, more eloquently than can be imagined. Disarmingly common, presented straightforwardly, they are arranged randomly - and, in the burst of reassuring insight they provide, those vessels are just enough: plain, useful, bathed in a light that illuminates their simple beauty. Humble, and satisfying, they are the postmillennial equivalent of the great Baroque Dutch Little Masters. |