Review: Scott Olson and Jerry Birchfield
16/11/17
Cleveland Museum of Art offers fantastic solo shows on Scott Olson, Jerry Birchfield, at Transformer Station
By Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
CLEVELAND, Ohio - A famous Leonardo da Vinci quote has special relevance to an outstanding pair of solo shows at the Transformer Station on the works of Cleveland artists Jerry Birchfield and Scott Olson, organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art.
In his famous "Treatise on Painting," Leonardo urged artists to seek inspiration in unusual places:
If you look upon an old wall covered with dirt, or the odd appearance of some streaked stones, you may discover several things like landscapes, battles, clouds, uncommon attitudes, humorous faces, draperies, etc. Out of this confused mass of objects, the mind will be furnished with an abundance of designs and subjects perfectly new."
Birchfield and Olson are abstractionists, and as such not interested in translating random stains on walls or stones into battle scenes or drapery. But they are interested in how randomness and chance can produce moments of ravishing beauty.
Provocative pairing
By pairing their shows - the first institutional exhibition either has received - Reto Thuring, the museum's curator of contemporary art, is obviously asking viewers to compare their works, which have a lot in common.
Birchfield, 32, a Cleveland photographer who produced an excellent series of portraits of Cleveland artist Dan Tranberg before his death earlier this year, uses inkjet print, plaster, enamel paint, graphite and unspecified tools to produce objects that might be slices of the walls described in Leonardo's treatise.
He also makes abstractions by casting unusual shadows on photographic paper and then solarizing the prints, exposing them to light to reverse the original light-dark relationships. The resulting images evoke mysterious nocturnal landscapes that crackle with a strange electricity.
Exquisite and intimate
Olson, 41, who lives in Kent, produces exquisite, intimately scaled abstract paintings that seem to have emerged organically on canvas or panels of wood without the artist's direct intervention.
The sheer variety of Olson's experiments - his show includes 34 paintings and sculptures from 2004 to 2017 - is striking.
In one small painting, he sketches a lattice in dark green on a sour yellow field that evokes a form of abstract musical notation. In another painting, luminous swaths of pale green paint glow on mysterious layers of brownish black. Yet another includes marks that evoke the stains left by a coffee mug or a paint can on a white surface.
The marks and gestures in these and other paintings don't have a telltale signature or a sense of the artist's ego yearning to burst out in full cry.
Both Olson and Birchfield are interested in creating works that have a sense of their own volition, as if they emerged as the outcome of a natural process, like moisture seeping through a plaster wall, or fall leaves settling randomly on sheets of shiny metal to create unusual patterns.
Part of a tradition
The work of each artist, in its own way, evokes the Leonardo treatise and the longstanding tradition in art inspired by it, from the 18thcentury inkblot drawings of Alexander Cozens to Dadaism, surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.
What differentiates Olson and Birchfield from earlier practitioners, especially the Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists, is that neither appear to be delving into the subconscious or dredging up extreme psychological states.
Theirs is not an art of weirdness or angst. It's about creating a state of wonder and an appreciation of the miracles that can happen in a studio when materials are approached in new and unusual ways, without preconceptions about what art is supposed to look like or how it's supposed to behave.
Birchfield is especially effective in his works on rectangular panels of plaster that have been stressed, scuffed, scratched, rubbed and excavated to produce surfaces of enormous textural complexity and tactile appeal.
Shades of gray
All are in shades of gray or black on white. The lack of color creates a sense of artlessness, as if Birchfield's creations were randomly chosen samples of an external reality that he discovered, rather than something he created out of his own will.
Olson's smaller paintings in oil on wood, with their fragmentary nature and sense of happy happenstance, also have this "bystander" effect.
But also on view are larger and more colorful abstract paintings by Olson that obviously were made with traditional materials and with brushes.
Consisting of curvy, colorful organic shapes that nestle or overlap one another, existing somewhere between still life and landscape, also feel as if they represent outcomes of an organic process presided over by the artist, but without a sense that he's guiding things in one direction or another.
Olson sets up the conditions for the emergence of the marvelous shapes and colors. The process has a natural, unforced ease and a quiet sense of the miraculous.
Any artist who can hit such notes is onto something.
The Cleveland Museum of Art is likewise demonstrating a special degree of alertness and attentiveness in the terrific Olson-Birchfield pairing.
Let's hope the museum - which decided only recently to take contemporary art and local contemporary art seriously - continues on the path it's taking now.
By Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
CLEVELAND, Ohio - A famous Leonardo da Vinci quote has special relevance to an outstanding pair of solo shows at the Transformer Station on the works of Cleveland artists Jerry Birchfield and Scott Olson, organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art.
In his famous "Treatise on Painting," Leonardo urged artists to seek inspiration in unusual places:
If you look upon an old wall covered with dirt, or the odd appearance of some streaked stones, you may discover several things like landscapes, battles, clouds, uncommon attitudes, humorous faces, draperies, etc. Out of this confused mass of objects, the mind will be furnished with an abundance of designs and subjects perfectly new."
Birchfield and Olson are abstractionists, and as such not interested in translating random stains on walls or stones into battle scenes or drapery. But they are interested in how randomness and chance can produce moments of ravishing beauty.
Provocative pairing
By pairing their shows - the first institutional exhibition either has received - Reto Thuring, the museum's curator of contemporary art, is obviously asking viewers to compare their works, which have a lot in common.
Birchfield, 32, a Cleveland photographer who produced an excellent series of portraits of Cleveland artist Dan Tranberg before his death earlier this year, uses inkjet print, plaster, enamel paint, graphite and unspecified tools to produce objects that might be slices of the walls described in Leonardo's treatise.
He also makes abstractions by casting unusual shadows on photographic paper and then solarizing the prints, exposing them to light to reverse the original light-dark relationships. The resulting images evoke mysterious nocturnal landscapes that crackle with a strange electricity.
Exquisite and intimate
Olson, 41, who lives in Kent, produces exquisite, intimately scaled abstract paintings that seem to have emerged organically on canvas or panels of wood without the artist's direct intervention.
The sheer variety of Olson's experiments - his show includes 34 paintings and sculptures from 2004 to 2017 - is striking.
In one small painting, he sketches a lattice in dark green on a sour yellow field that evokes a form of abstract musical notation. In another painting, luminous swaths of pale green paint glow on mysterious layers of brownish black. Yet another includes marks that evoke the stains left by a coffee mug or a paint can on a white surface.
The marks and gestures in these and other paintings don't have a telltale signature or a sense of the artist's ego yearning to burst out in full cry.
Both Olson and Birchfield are interested in creating works that have a sense of their own volition, as if they emerged as the outcome of a natural process, like moisture seeping through a plaster wall, or fall leaves settling randomly on sheets of shiny metal to create unusual patterns.
Part of a tradition
The work of each artist, in its own way, evokes the Leonardo treatise and the longstanding tradition in art inspired by it, from the 18thcentury inkblot drawings of Alexander Cozens to Dadaism, surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.
What differentiates Olson and Birchfield from earlier practitioners, especially the Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists, is that neither appear to be delving into the subconscious or dredging up extreme psychological states.
Theirs is not an art of weirdness or angst. It's about creating a state of wonder and an appreciation of the miracles that can happen in a studio when materials are approached in new and unusual ways, without preconceptions about what art is supposed to look like or how it's supposed to behave.
Birchfield is especially effective in his works on rectangular panels of plaster that have been stressed, scuffed, scratched, rubbed and excavated to produce surfaces of enormous textural complexity and tactile appeal.
Shades of gray
All are in shades of gray or black on white. The lack of color creates a sense of artlessness, as if Birchfield's creations were randomly chosen samples of an external reality that he discovered, rather than something he created out of his own will.
Olson's smaller paintings in oil on wood, with their fragmentary nature and sense of happy happenstance, also have this "bystander" effect.
But also on view are larger and more colorful abstract paintings by Olson that obviously were made with traditional materials and with brushes.
Consisting of curvy, colorful organic shapes that nestle or overlap one another, existing somewhere between still life and landscape, also feel as if they represent outcomes of an organic process presided over by the artist, but without a sense that he's guiding things in one direction or another.
Olson sets up the conditions for the emergence of the marvelous shapes and colors. The process has a natural, unforced ease and a quiet sense of the miraculous.
Any artist who can hit such notes is onto something.
The Cleveland Museum of Art is likewise demonstrating a special degree of alertness and attentiveness in the terrific Olson-Birchfield pairing.
Let's hope the museum - which decided only recently to take contemporary art and local contemporary art seriously - continues on the path it's taking now.