art reviews
David Rankin
At Andre Zarre >>
By Jadie Cohn
Raffi Tokatlian
AFP Galleries >>
By Mary Hrbacek
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David Rankin
At Andre Zarre
By Jadie Cohn
These new paintings by David Rankin, seemingly simple and direct, are complex and often disturbing works. This apparent straightforwardness is buttressed and fortified by a subtle fragility, a series of nerve endings that the inhabit elegant calligraphic lines of vertical and horizontal ligaments traversing the canvas, or in this case, the silk.
The Mappings, which at first look as though they can be taken in, in one glance, are not what they seem. Stand for a few minutes in front of any of one these paintings and it becomes clear that the whole is made up of many individual characters, threads and filaments. Each one is unique. They are interwoven and integrated, these trajectories and tracings, yet each one is singular and separate. These progressions and continuums locate the human spirit; they track and delineate the fortitude and sorrows and discomforts that make up a life.
How to identify and express the themes of what it is to exist in the world, what it means to be a human being, has been at the core of Rankin’s life work: From the 1969 Grey Rain paintings, through to the later Dona Nobis Pacem series, the Golgotha paintings, the Prophecy of Dry Bones paintings and the Buddha Bending and Elemental Union paintings to the new Mappings work. Born in England, he has lived and worked in New York for the past twenty years.
Rankin’s themes have, in the course of more than four decades, remained consistent. He has explored the issues of identity, individuality, isolation, joy, pain, contentment and longing in often mysterious and abstract images. The Mappings paintings are painted on silk; silk that Rankin found in a vast silk market, in Hangzhou, China. Hangzhou, with its iconic West Lake, is the seat of the ancient Southern Sung Dynasty.
This particular silk, called Xiang Yu Sha (perfumed cloud silk) was originally made by the fishermen along the Guangzhou coast. It is prepared by coating the silk with a mixture of mashed yams and river clay which is then left to dry in the sun before being washed. On one side is a rich charcoal, infused with shades of red and the other side a cloudy cinnamon color.
Transformed by Rankin into the Mappings paintings, the silk is populated with lives, if you will, with lamentations and ruminations. The lines, painted in ochre, red and shades of grey, move through their lives. Each line carries its own story. For Rankin the use of this Xiang Yu Sha silk forges a connection with the Southern Sung Dynasty painters and poets, in particular Du Fu, Liang Kai and Ma Yuan, whose lives and works were a touchstone and an inspiration and a comfort for Rankin when he was young.
Rankin’s paintings were exhibited in Beijing, in an exhibition called, Beyond The Mundane, in 1986, many years before Rankin himself would visit China. In 2007 he exhibited sculptures for the first time at the Andre Zarre Gallery, New York. In that show, his ghostly, calligraphic figures and dwellings were made out of painted and bound bamboo. The current exhibition, Mappings, gives Rankin yet another opportunity to engage with the ineffable, to do his job as a painter. M
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Raffi Tokatlian
AFP Galleries
By Mary Hrbacek
In Tokatlian’s figurative bronze sculptures, distorted hybrid forms narrate classic mythological themes. His Surrealist style gives scope to his philosophical life view, in works that express the struggle and endurance that arise in response to devastating human experiences. Irony and sarcasm are non-existent in this work. Elongated shapes and tortured anatomical forms evoke the suffering and transcendence that defines his family’s Armenian heritage as genocide survivors.
Tokatlian’s oeuvre searches meaning in life and presumes a special destiny for mankind in themes that span love, loss, inner conflict, devastation, birth, death, and the reconciliation of opposites. His choice of material and method, the bronze lost wax process, find resonance in the later works of his muses, Picasso and Giacometti; and his amalgam of human and animal features recalls the dark nightmare visions of Goya. In the tradition of Surrealism, the artist expands the repertoire of visual language. He expresses dynamic forward movement and balance in the gestures of his figures by elevating them onto the toes of one foot. He employs flowing locks of flame-like hair to indicate the presence of wind or other unseen forces. In some of his figures, elongated necks distort the distance from the head, evoking loss of personal control.
The variations in scale and proportion within one piece allude to Tokatlian’s artistic kinship with his hero, Alberto Giacometti. In the work, Warning for a Black Destiny of Mankind, 2006, the running dog’s leash and collar resemble the bones of a rib cage, suggesting Cerberus, the mythological hound of Hell. The amputated leg, deformed anatomy, and stretched neck suggest a hunter searching for a means of survival. The elongated legs imply rapid movement, while the enlarged hands exhort grasping alertness and inner turbulence.
Hope Considered the Survival displays a human-beast amalgam forged in the spirit of Goya. A long, segmented neck stretches to allow a backward look at a small seed, which possibly represents the beginning of renewed hope. In Man Cannot Be Vanquished, a crouching hybrid human-lion figure gazes intently at the severed monkey’s head that he clutches in his hand. The piece may imply that the human spirit retains its nobility through the various stages of evolution. Another sculpture, Status of the Eternal, displays a nude woman with arms and legs affixed to a rectangular rack. The woman is not helplessly bound, as her higher self, represented by a predominant head and shoulders with arms, embraces and controls the top portion of the structure. This symbolism connotes that a woman is led by her nature to express her physical, sexual impulses; the staircase set below her invokes an ebb and flow to this expression.
Tokatlian’s sculptures incorporate the spirit of mythological gods and goddesses who face challenges that often transform them physically into unusual, new shapes. The artist adopts the role of mythic creator by inventing metaphoric forms that allude to and express struggles and challenges in his own life history. The family saga of persecution and survival pervades Tokatlian’s art; this work apprehends the struggles that define the human condition. M
