Art Lies, Volume 28, Fall 2000 Page: 100
112 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 28 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Michael Kennaugh
Davis NorthcuttEila Park
LAWNDALE ART CENTER
HOUSTON
by Laura LarkMichael Kennaugh, Eila Park, and
Davis Northcutt all have issues with
painting, and each, in their different way
confirms that, like it or not, the issues
and the dilemmas of painting never
really go away.
Myths and Monuments was Michael
Kennaugh's apt name for his main gallery
installation. Six large canvases testified
that this painter is wrestling with big
topics: Art History. Literature. Archi-
tecture. In Ziggurat, a two-paneled land-
scape vaguely insinuating the ancient
pyramidal architecture form for which it
is named, one could trace Kennaugh's
concerns with the history of his chosen
medium. Here the artist is by turns
emphatic, impulsive, and violent; there,
passages have been painstakingly worked
and reworked. The sketchy architecture,
in deep brick tones on the left and in
opaque black on the right, suggested that
Kennaugh dreams of ancient greatness by
acknowledging its present lack. A cloud
of manically applied black hovers above
the ruins on the right, and a feverishly
drawn black ladder leading to nothing
over the horizon implies that the roman-
tic pursuit of historical myth often meets
resistance when it encounters the present
tense. Kennaugh's routine is as follows:
artist thinks great things, thinks better of
them, and, as a way of having done with
it, throws down a gloppy, brushstroke-
laden hunk of paint. And if depicting
Love, Death, and other grandes recits
remains tantalizingly out of reach, one
can always exorcise one's demons in a fit
of gestural abstraction.
Pale Horse, installed on the wall
opposite Ziggurat, nicely showcases the
serial processes that make Kennaugh's
paintings such multilayered, multitex-
tured, multivalent affairs. A scrubbed-in
wash of slate blue gray in one corner is
counterbalanced by a mysterious, almost
graphically limned cylindrical object
100 ARTL!ES Fall 2000that suggests a portion
of a lost toy, or a veiled
reference to Duchamp's
chocolate grin-der nes-
tled in an opposing field
of white. The painted
field itself has two dis-
tinct characteristics: at
some points the paint is
thick and ponderous,
hiding previously drawn parts of the
object, while in other places it is thin and
washy. Here paint itself evokes a lost
mythical world, as the obscured drawings
make one think of childhood rocking
horses, locked away in adulthood but still
longed for. It seems personal somehow,
eschewing the monumentality of some of
the other large works, which at their
weakest seem Twomblyesque without the
audacity that accompanies that artist's
best works. In Drums of Summer, a large,
wash-laden triptych, Kennaugh's process-
es became altogether oppressive, achiev-
ing the something-for-everyone feel of
art calculated for the corporate lobby.
Michael Kennaugh does some lovely
things with white paint, however. There
was a thick, whipped-up blob of it on a
paper piece called Between Land and Sea
that was really wonderfully disgusting.
Here Kennaugh seems to be trying to
achieve some light, ethereal, intangibility
through the burdensome medium of oils:
the impossibility of the effort was reflect-
ed in this smallish paper diptych.
Although the label claimed they were
canvas, a small series of tiny paper pieces
mounted on inch-thick blocks of wood
were among the most evocative works in
the show. Easy to miss next to their gar-
gantuan cousins, The Four Elements are
essentially pencil drawings (erased and
washed over, of course) that Kennaugh
compulsively surrounded with thick
white paint at the edges. The largest, ret-
icently executed, seems full of memoriesof skies pregnant with
thunderstorms .
Paradoxically, while
Kennaugh's Myths and
Monuments are provoca-
tive in both their scale
and execution, it is in the
small pieces that the artist
seems clearest and most
definitively on his own.
If Kennaugh tackled the mythical
and monumental, Elia Park's untitled
exhibition of oil paintings in the smaller
gallery at the rear of Lawndale's first
floor were acutely personal. Nearly every
work in the exhibition seemed to be an
attempt to fathom the artist's own
depths, physical or otherwise.
Stylistically, Park homages the Moderns.
At times this is expressed in terms of
palette, at other times in terms of line.
Both Untitled (purple) and Untitled (blue)
feature a strangely hunched-over bio-
morphic shape, possibly human, with a
large burdensome form on its back. Both
figures in these works, heavily outlined in
black, seemed vaguely inspired by
Rouault, and they struck this viewer as
self-portraits. However, where Rouault's
line tended to corral his subjects into a
neat package, Park's drew the viewer into
a murky and confusing space that was
more emotional than anatomical. Within
Untitled (purple)'s thick, black lines, bril-
liant passages of magenta filled the
"torso" and equally engaging bits of ver-
million filled the fascinating "head."
The lizard perched on the subject's
shoulder in Untitled (green) has the
weirdness of a tequila-soaked nightmare,
and the obvious battle that Park fought
to texturize the underlying surface of the
painting reinforces the sense of morn-
ing-after torment. The anguish implicit
in these works places them in the tradi-
tion of memento mori. In palette, howev-
er, it was a bit too recognizably Fauve
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Angelini, Surpik & Hernández, Abdel. Art Lies, Volume 28, Fall 2000, periodical, 2000; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228058/m1/102/: accessed April 30, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .