Landscape, Nature, & Space
Featuring: Margaret Wall-Romana, Eckhard Etzold, Mary Lou Zelazny, Gregory Euclide, Lucho Pozo, Cynthia Hooper, Kirk LeClaire, Ian Kimmerly
Bucheon Gallery
San Francisco, CA
22 February – 22 March, 2008

by Tonya Warner

Upon seeing the title of this exhibition, I was immediately reminded of a graduate program at the art school I attended, entitled “Art, Space, Nature.” The work on show at Bucheon, however, is of quite a different stripe – whereas the ASN program focuses on art in the landscape and site-specificity, this exhibition, mostly comprised of paintings, finds cohesion in the loose concept of imagery from nature. Where this is a more traditional and literal interpretation of landscape, these works also address nature in a more conceptual vein.

Stand-outs include Eckhard Etzold, a German-born painter who draws from photographs of displays in natural history museums as his source material. What makes these works most interesting, conceptually and visually, is the inclusion of reflections on the glass cases and weird discolorations that come from bad lighting. Etzold’s works present an artificial view of nature – taken out of context and placed within the structuring structure of the museum, these specimen build our knowledge of the world at large. When living things are removed from nature, preserved, when they become specimen, a mediating shift takes place – one that is amplified further through Etzold’s process of painting from photographs. What we stand before in the gallery, therefore, is so removed from the reality of the thing in space, that nature itself becomes nothing more than an abstracted ideal.

Another notable artist in this exhibition is Gregory Euclide, whose works address the tension between flatness and depth, long existent in the field of landscape painting. His approaches, however, have nothing to do with foreshortening. Euclide’s pieces fall into two categories: flat and sculptural. The flat works are on large pieces of paper and feature swirling, undulating pieces of landscape, an abstract vision that speaks more to the memory of an experience of a place than an actual physical landscape. The second way Euclide chooses to approach the issue of flatness/depth is to introduce sculptural elements such as crumpling and distorting the paper/picture plane. Many of these, including two in this exhibition, involve a wall mount made of a clear PETG dome attached to a wooden base that houses the crumpled painting. At Bucheon, there is one workwith the dome intact and another where the paper is bursting out of holes where the dome has been melted and pulled. This creates somewhat of a distopian vision, counteracting the romantic and utopian nature of traditional landscape painting.

Overall, the show is saved from its clichéd and unambitious premise by these two artists. It would be interesting to see a show of only Etzold and Euclide’s work since both address the distance between nature and representation in equally interesting though quite different ways.

http://www.bucheon.com/exhibitions08.html

http://www.eckhardetzold.com/

http://www.gregoryeuclide.com

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