From Seattle, with Gusto
Kinga Czerska and John Dempcy show Portlanders how it’s done.
January 27th, 2010
Jenene Nagy At Disjecta | Portland’s Christo goes big.0 comments
January 13th, 2010
The Dregs Marylhurst Art Gym | Two artists sift through a dead man’s life.4 comments
December 30th, 2009
Best Of Visual Arts 2009 | 2009 kicked the Portland art scene’s ass—but it kicked back. 0 comments
December 9th, 2009
Mel George At Bullseye, Reiner Riedler At Blue Sky | Wishing you were someplace—anyplace—else.0 comments
November 18th, 2009
China Design Now Portland Art Museum | PAM’s new show unwittingly plays into the worst stereotypes of Communist China.3 comments
October 7th, 2009
The Century Project At Bamboo Grove | Photographer Frank Cordelle wrestles with body acceptance.74 comments
September 30th, 2009
High Art | Tom Cramer resurrects the psychedelic ’60s.3 comments
August 19th, 2009
Shits & Giggles At Launch Pad | Jeremy Okai Davis paints the halcyon days of summer.0 comments
August 12th, 2009
Manor Of Art At Milepost Five | A hundred-plus artists turn a former nursing home into an aesthetic free-for-all.1 comment
July 29th, 2009
Marking Portland Portland Art Museum | Tattoo art graduates from bohemia to the blue-hairs.0 comments
 Talon by Kinga Czerska at augen de soto |
[July 23rd, 2008] Kinga Czerska’s acrylic paintings look flat in reproduction. But in person they’re surprisingly present, owing to the knifepoint precision of their contours. The pieces, shown this month at Augen’s De Soto location, are abstract but look vaguely like blades of multicolored lemongrass sprouting and hanging in unexpected directions. Waft fills the top of the panel with striations of delicate, muted tones. Below, at the picture plane’s halfway mark, the strips begin to arc downward, like bundled wheat drooping with gravity. Meander floats across the composition in three tiers, while Funnel coalesces around a floral-like oval. The works manage to convey both femininity and masculine aggression, delicacy and a sharpness of execution that veers toward the violent. This is Georgia O’Keeffe by way of Don Corleone: gracious but exacting, welcoming but one step away from slitting your throat.
At Augen’s downtown location, John Dempcy’s acrylic fantasias on clay board impress with their sumptuous abstract imagery and dazzling color. Using droppers and needles, Dempcy drips paints of differing viscosities onto his board and lets the materials seep and weep into concentric circles that evoke the eye’s retina. Grid-based, the works are nevertheless freespirited and endlessly inventive compositionally. Some, like Fish Story, stick to the grid’s regularity, while others, such as Sweet Breath, cluster toward the center like a nucleating galaxy. Horse Drawn, meanwhile, could be subtitled: Rhapsody on an Egg Yolk. Lemon, acid green, umber, turquoise, Kelly green, hot pink—if ever a hue was born or dreamed, Dempcy ups the saturation and goes for broke.
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It’s worth noting that both Czerska and Dempcy—and abstract colorist extraordinaire Jaq Chartier, currently showing at Elizabeth Leach—are all Seattle artists. Portland artists could stand to take a lesson from these three. Understatement has its place, but so does overstatement. If you have something considered and important to say, why not say it with gusto?
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