Edward Shalala at Saint Peter's Church - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Edward Shalala's use of fire in his work goe back to 1988 when he first experienced an Ojibwa Indian formality called a "sweat lodge." The intent of the ceremony is to help nation through problems in their lives by means of way of a very intense experience of fire and heat combined with words. The heat is provided by means of boulders of granite prepared in a fire. At his first sweat-lodge meeting, Shalala left the formality somewhere in the middle because the heat was for a like reason intense. When he saw the red-hot boulder Shalala was reminded of what he learned when, at the age of eight, he was taken to the ruins of Pompeii, where he saw the imprint of a figure of a stripling about his own age covering his organ of sights against the hot ashes and lava of the famous destructive eruption of Mt Vesuvius. A year after his first sweat hut Shalala initiated one himself. During it, he experienced a catharsis which l to his at hand work with fire.

Shalala's new work, called Hot Sonatas (after an advanced in years jazz recording by Joe Venuti and Earl Hines), is his first use of fire itself to make art, although he used the sublimated fire of electricity to sear canvas and paint in previous works. To make fiery Sonatas, Shalala seared #12 cotton canvas with the flame from a propane torch.

Shalala uses the flame, which reach forths about an inch from the tip of the torch, as if it were a brush, caressing the surface of the canvas, making more or les intense marks. He give in charges to these works as paintings although I would revive an advanced in years term: "pyrography," the art of producing pictures by the agency of scorching, as my 1916 Webster's Collegiate Dictionary places it. Using the flame gingerly, for fear that the canvas ignite, he makes a lighter or darker brown consume on the slightly off-white surface of the woven fabric The areas that he wants to leave unsinged through flame he covers with ranks of round metal pieces which he transplants and saves for reuse after making the pyrograph. To Americans, the circular marks have a familiar caliber because they are made using cent pennies. The designs on these works were laid without with pennies, then burned; then the pennies were rearranged, consume ed again (sometimes on the same canvas), rearranged and reduce to ashesed yet again, until the series of 25 canvases was complete

For the viewer of this present to view the installation of a rather strait-laced row of 17-by-19-inch canvases placed 6 inches apart at approximate organ of sight level on a beige wall appeared rather like Minimal art until examination prov that each work is different from the nearest The works are not generated systematically from each other on the contrary arise from choices about where to place the pennies and in what way to singe the cloth which are different in each canvas. Each pyrograph has its be in possession of character which is not derived from that of its neighbor. more [i]or[/i] less of the arrangements of reduce to ashesed lines look a bit like Chinese hexagrams, on the other hand only one actually contains six lines. A not many of the neighbors in the series are reversals--what is off-black in individual is off-white in the other, on the other hand this, too, is not pursu systematically. The issue of the series is primitivity itself rather than a simulacrum of the primitive. The word primitive is loaded against the user no matter what is meant, on the contrary I still think that these pyrographs demonstrate something like the early meditations of the fire-using talkers.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group