Today’s artwork tends to be demonstrative, making its point immediately with memorable techniques, as if in competition with a thousand other offerings. (It is, of course.) What, then, to make of the small, strange works by Chuck Bowdish, who seems intent mainly on edifying himself?
Organized by Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, this exhibition of 20 works radiates an atmosphere of intensely private meanderings. Employing a variety of media—pen and ink, oil, painted paper collage, pure watercolor—Bowdish places figures in simplified, stylized landscapes that suggest the luminous muteness of certain outsider artists (James Castle and Henry Darger come to mind). But his images evince a decided knowingness, too: a sophistication about drawing and color, without the compulsion to show it off.
Chuck Bowdish’s “Seagulls and Figures”
In a three-foot wide collage from 2009, overcoated men stride past palm trees and seagulls under a sky of wrinkly pasted-on tissue. A five-inch-square portrait from 2000, built of countless ink crosshatchings, imparts a tone of wonderful, shadowy proximity. With a kind of tender bluntness, several small watercolors describe children preoccupied with sticks or standing beneath trees; in one dated 1997, four children cavort in blocked-in planes of light and shadow that suggest a supple David Park. A tiny watercolor from 2000 of a purple-brown figure, stretched on a bright green towel, delights with its spare but brilliant hues. Why is the sky black when the figure is illuminated? No matter, since, like the other peculiar images here, it convinces.
Allusions to early Italian Renaissance paintings become at times a little too nostalgic, and when the narratives gel, the wonder begins to dissipate. (Case in point: a girl racing past a dead mobster, a single tower looming on the horizon.) But these moments barely distract from the radiant curiosity elsewhere.
The exhibition also showcases the publication of an artist’s book, American Dream, with text and line drawings by Bowdish. In its pages, images of soldiers, violin players and nude models commingle with quotes by the artist and familiar public figures.
>
Chuck Bowdish through July 2 at Gallery Schlesinger, 24 E. 73rd St. (betw. 5th & Madison Aves.), 212-734-3600.
