RUNNING HORSES AND TROMPE L'OEIL PAINTINGS >>>

A friend posted a photo on Facebook this morning. It was a sculpture of two horses mounted on the wall in such a way to create the impression that they were coming out of the wall in a powerful burst of motion. The form of the horses was skeletal, a mass of open-weave flowing lines like bones and muscles and the horses' flowing manes but no skin. The viewer sees into and through the horses much like those by Deborah Butterfield - the primary difference being that Butterfield's horses are static and these horses by Sayaka Ganz are depicted as in fast motion. Of the hundreds and hundreds of horses she has created, nearly every one stands in an almost identical position as if reaching his head down to munch on hay.

I saw a few Butterfield horses at Greg Kucera Gallery a few years back, and I was suitably impressed. But this morning while perusing a page filled with images of her horse sculptures I quickly grew bored.

Ganz's horses are dynamic. The forms and lines are free-flowing, lyrical and dramatic. My only criticism is that they may be a little too romantic and fanciful. Given time I suspect I might get bored with them as well. But here's the interesting thing: the comments on my friend's Facebook post were all about the movement and the smoothly flowing lines. Nobody even bothered to mention the fact that the sculptures were made out of recycled plastic utensils - knives, forks, spoons, colanders and spatulas, a veritable garbage heap of used kitchen ware.

I love that nobody mentioned that. I get rather disgusted at times when people rave over how clever it is that an artist can make art out of odd found materials. Granted, it takes a certain amount of skill, in some cases a huge amount of skill. And it's nice when waste material can be put to use as art rather than tossed in the landfill. But that's not what art is about. Art is about the emotions and the ideas expressed and about the aesthetic arrangement of shapes and colors. At least the people commenting on Ganz's sculpture were talking about the artistic quality of the work and not just how cool it was that it was made out of plastic utensils.

My disgust with people who gush over recycled art without consideration of the artistic merits of the work is equaled only by my disgust with people who gush over photo-realistic paintings regardless of any merits or lack thereof of anything other than how "real" it looks. I can admire the technical skill, but that's not what art is about.

It used to be called trompe l'oeil, a French phrase meaning fool the eye. The phrase comes from the baroque period (around 1600), and it was a kind of visual trickery or optical illusion created by a combination of deep perspective and smooth modeling of light and shadow. In the hands of giants like Carravagio it was art of the highest order. In the hands of many others it was trickery and nothing more.

Since the 1960s a lot of American realists have painted what came to be known as photo-realist art, a form of trompe l'oeil. Probably the best of these is Phillip Pearlstein who paints nudes in interior scenes. Pearlstein has referred to himself as an abstract artist because even though his nudes look strikingly realistic his major concern is the arrangement of forms on a flat surface - pure abstraction.

I recently discovered a local painter of ultra-realistic scenes who may warrant attention. His name is Charles Salak. He lives in Gig Harbor and his work is currently included in a group show at Pierce College Puyallup. I have seen only a handful of his paintings and those only in photographs, so I can't judge them, but at least one of them, "Orange Still Life" rivals some of the best still life paintings from the baroque era in both composition and richness of color. It would be nice to think that he could be another Pearlstein, but I will withhold judgment until I get to see more.