Vesna Pavlović/Ian Whitmore at Fusebox

From lobby to shining lobby, Vesna Pavlović draws an international axis of modernism between two twentieth-century economic engines: the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York and the Palace of Federation in New Belgrade. "Collection/Kolekcija"—Pavlović’s show in Fusebox’s primary space, and, lamentably, the gallery’s final exhibition—features large-scale prints of these office spaces, absent their occupants. The series might have been shot in the wake of a lucrative, globe-spanning conference call, so similar are the offices in their ambition (and design).

Of course, these photographs don’t bear testimony to the war of ideas that played out between these two centers—or the outcomes. The Palace of Federation has essentially become a mausoleum since the fall of Tito (and Yugoslavia), a time-slice preserved from a grander era. On the other hand, the fundamentals that earned the win for the lessees of Rockefeller’s building aren’t borne out by their workspace.

Vesna Pavlović [insert tombstone text]

Large and overstated, Pavlović’s photos play up the kitschy, even embarrassing sincerity of conviction of these spaces. She uses a coarse film grain to contradict spic-n-span reflectionive surfaces: linoleum floors, marble columns, brushed-chrome elevator doors and polished conference tables. In the Chase photos, the scale emphasizes what’s missing—art. Works from the venerated Chase Manhattan Collection are nowhere to be seen, as if they packed them up after that war effort was over. Of the two series, it’s the ostensible victors’ that appear to be hollow.

In Fuxebox’s project space, Ian Whitmore gets right back to his examination of the tipping point between representational and abstract painting, a topic he explored in two previous sold-out shows at the gallery. (I wrote about the last show here.) A small exhibition of six new works, "Little Lies" also plays on contrasting value systems—in this case, between artifice and further artifice.

The New Look, for example, is about borders. The nominal subject of the painting is the Soyuz-Apollo Test Project, which was a test of a common space docking unit developed by the USA and USSR; the painting shows the two shuttles, joined in flagrante delicto like summer love bugs. It might well be a picture postcard, a metaphor for a handsome international border, but for one patch of brassy, Philip Guston–esque abstraction, emerging from the canvas where one would expect to see a shuttle panel depicted. Like creeping doubt, the abstract element destabilizes the comfortable representational image (which we know in hindsight, anyway, to be a misleading portrait of affairs between these superpowers).

In The Free Design, Whitmore repurposes a loosely rendered balcony that has had a long service in art history: originally appearing in Manet’s The Balcony and then again in Magritte’s Perspective II: Manet’s Balcony, the fence is a versatile reference for changing values in painting. The Free Design may be the artist’s best painting yet: in it he takes his signature motif—Rococo-inspired, representational objects infused with a maelstrom of gestural abstraction—and locks it behind the gate. Whereas Magritte replaced Manet’s Balcony figures with coffins, Whitmore has substituted his whole artistic enterprise; paradoxically, the shadow that falls over his still scene is sincere in a way that the artist suggests that painting perhaps cannot be.

That constitutional cynicism is revealed in another piece, New York, New York, in which Whitmore deviates from the highbrow with a watercolor fashion sketch of those notorious alienoids, Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen. (Looking a little less boho-chic than they do in the tabloids, here the twins are sporting matching red fuchsia skirts and “I [Heart] NY” t-shirts.) Well, the resemblance isn’t perfect. But it is idiosyncratically straightforward—except for just a dab of light violent pigment. A faint splotch falling like an accident in the empty space just between the twins, the mark obliterates the representational fidelity of the image. (Fitting, since the Olsen waifs themselves are, in a sense, obliterated images of real girls.)

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That Whitmore and Pavlović are so strong—and that they represent the rule at the gallery, not the exception—makes the loss of this space sting all the more. I can say with confidence, informed partly by source and partly by gut, that we'll see these two artists in area galleries. Other District gallerists can't absorb all the rest of the artists, a real shame. But! No time for tears! The point of this epilogue is to express my best wishes to Sarah Finlay and Patrick Murcia. Here's hoping that San Francisco welcomes them warmly and that the gallery that follows in their place carries on with the very fine tradition of always serving Sierra Nevada at openings.

Posted by Kriston at February 10, 2006 4:49 PM