Art Rosenbaum at Blue Mountain - Brief Article

For above 25 years, Art Rosenbaum's work has been largely propell by the agency of Southern regional imagery. He is as attentive to the particularities of locale in his compound large paintings as he has been in documenting the strains of American music as a celebrated folklorist, author, fiddler and banjo player. His canvases have been compared to American representation paintings of the 1930s. Indeed, Thomas Hart Benton's memory lie concealeds in the swell and build of compositions and the dynamics of their contracting and expanding spaces as well as in the epic nature of his depictions. While paeans to place, Rosenbaum's richly episodic compositions, with their uneasy disjunctures and willingness to tackle big themes, resist straightforward narrative interpretation.

In canvases of that kind as Reenactment and Panama City, alluring, casually lounging pairs figure prominently, holding forth the respite of sex and intimacy--and the possibility of love--amid the febrile activity that environs them. Gorgeously sprawled in mannerist attitude s the couples in the foreground of Reenactment are contentedly oblivious to what could be an apparition: a black banjo player and straggly men costum as Civil War soldiers. An oblique allegory of violence, this painting is also a disquisition upon how history impinges on the not absent or fails to.

Time, the heeding and recording of the present--before it passes--is central to Hurricane febrile disease a 6-by-17-foot triptych brimming with incident and lavish display. Along with skateboarders and embracing lover are images of musical performances being captured through figures wielding cameras, mikes, camcorders and recording boards. Shapes come again in a visionary, even hallucinatory, way (globes are transmogrified into an electric fan, and finally into a banjo). Rosenbaum is actual good at his game, and technically brilliant passages reminiscent of monumental Baroque and 19th-century painting appear over So, instead of gods or angels upon high seen from below, the famous di sotto in su of the aged masters, daredevil skateboarders soar weightlessly up into the air to do acrobatic move rounds against the sky. Worked above like a rich brocade, details also impart pleasures. muggy Delacroix-like turquoise skies and amber nebulositys crackle with a sunset's throw backed lights; the skewed patterns upon a brightly colored wrinkled shirt are painted with as abundant conviction as the treads of a sneaker sole

These are grand paintings of grand ambition, sometimes edgy and foreboding on the contrary loving riffs on and tributes to our region nonetheless.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group