| Oftentimes a
restaurant or club will book a band month after month because of the
consistent, top-notch music the musicians keep cranking out. For a
band, such a gig means that it has achieved a solid repertoire of
songs that the audience can look forward to seeing time and again.
Live music, after all, has to be fresh and invigorating for each
show in order to keep the fans absorbed.
If there is anything like a house
band in the visual arts community in Austin, Philip Trussell is just
that. Each spring for the last six years, the New England native has
produced an exhibition of new paintings and drawings at Alternate
Current Art Space, with each of these shows unusual and refreshingly
vibrant and no two exactly the same. This year, once again, Trussell
delivers a new symphony of canvases and again we cannot help but
hear the music in his brushstrokes.
Trussell, who is in his 50s,
evokes as much energy and youth in his artwork as a 25-year-old
guitarist at a Friday night gig. The sheer volume of material and
mind-boggling quality he manages to produce every year are those of
an artist half his age. This year's show includes more than 50 new
canvases, most of which have been painted since January. The artist
chooses not to title any of his works, content instead to group
enough paintings in one area to create a theme (I counted four),
leaving titles to the imagination of the audience. In a handwritten
note to the viewers, Trussell hints at his technique: "What matters
is the space and time yielded by the study. The paintings are
instruments to be played."
For all his lively output,
Trussell remains exact and adept at his craft. The artist has a
studied and detailed eye for nudes, a common subject in his
paintings. In one of the artist's thematic groups, male and female
figures populate baroque-style landscapes and mythic scenarios that
at times bridge those ancient worlds to futuristic, post-apocalyptic
cityscapes. One canvas has a male nude crawling through windows,
depicted as light blue and white shades of color, as if he were
being born through time, emerging into a concrete world of dark
blues, blacks, and yellows.
Not surprisingly, most of
Trussell's paintings seem busy and alive, an influence that may be
linked to the early 20th-century Futurists, in particular Marcel
Duchamp and his famous work Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.
In that painting, as in Trussell's, there appear to be overlapping
views of the same figure, as if the artist were painting under a
strobe light. There is a rearing horse or a country landscape
painted all in purple, as well as larger nude studies in which the
figures seem to have four arms or five faces. Trussell seems to have
captured a myriad of poses of one model on a single canvas. The
colors are vibrant and lively yet brooding, as if some imminent
downfall were lurking around the corner.
In a striking tangent to the
other subjects, Trussell's current show includes a group of urban
landscapes depicting mysterious nighttime street scenes where parked
cars and distant lights depict lonely city images. The architecture
in these pieces is from an older part of the country, and we get the
feeling that we're standing out in the cold of some cozy community
of which we're not a part. The mood is sad but peaceful in these
pieces, and the colors are dark with the exception of the yellow
lights casting warm shadows on the cold concrete streets busied by
anonymous cars. If this is indicative of where Trussell is headed
with his painting for next year's show, then we can, yet again, look
forward to some great music. — Sam Martin
reprinted from the Austin
Chronicle -
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/vol17/issue41/arts.exhibitionism.html
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