‘The Retro Show’
Review of F8 Gallery's Retro Show
Reviewed by Wayne Alan Brenner, Fri., Aug. 12, 2005
The Retro Show
F8 Fine Art Gallery, through Aug. 27
You'd expect F8 Gallery, located as it is near Wiggy's liquors and Z'Tejas and Cafe Josie and all those eclectic little interior-decor shoppes along West Sixth, to be something of a bastion of elegance. And it is, reassuringly, but the proprietors don't let that get in the way of presenting artwork that is also, elegant or not, compelling and arresting. Now they're offering "The Retro Show," a retrospective of artists whose works have been previously featured in the tony space, and you needn't be of Scandinavian heritage to appreciate the variety and quality of this graphic smorgasbord.
Ray Donley has long been associated with F8, at least in the public mind, and his candle-against-the-dark oil portraits of concubines and clowns, of mysterious figures in sumptuous clothes, are represented here by several new pieces – Sleep Walker No. 3 foremost among them, I suggest, due to the way the figure's blouseline trickles streamlike, in solitary whiteness, to its frame's terminus and threatens to extend the subject beyond its formal borders.
Michael Kessler's work eschews the figurative arena and instead outs the latent grids of drafting, his large, multilayered acrylic-on-panel Chambered appearing like a Rennie Mackintosh dream of schematics shattered and reconfigured through translucent glass planes. Most abstraction leaves your reviewer dulled and uncaring; this is the sort of work that galvanizes and leaves him wanting more, please, Mr. Kessler.
Randall Reed's mixed-media constructions could be companion pieces to Kessler's: Imagine such abstractions distilled, shrunk, and embedded in the center of a vast, complementary field. Imagine a funerary plaque fit to adorn a tomb for the soul of an angel, especially one of the higher seraphim; you may begin to picture Reed's Red Sea or one of the others of his works available at F8.
Frequent Chronicle illustrator Nathan Jensen's paintings are on display here, too, the colorful anatomies depicted perhaps less exaggerated than those in his various streetside murals. There's even more, paintingwise, but let's cap this review with an impressed nod to the photographers whose black-and-white captures lend a stark realism to the gallery's 2-D proceedings: Polly Chandler, Tony Stromberg, M. Delos Reyes, and David Verba. And, if this is truly your point-by-point guide while you're buzzing through an as-many-galleries-as-possible day of art? Don't leave the venue until you've gazed for several minutes at Corn Crib, one of the split-toned silver gelatin monoprints by Deborah Poisot.
Of course it's called "The Retro Show"; these artists are well worth going back for.
