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recent shows
PORTLAND
Joe Macca:
“slowblivion”
at PDX Contemporary Art
Joe Macca’s
“slowblivion” at PDX Contemporary Art is a single-minded etude
on concentricity and the sometimes abstruse links between
abstraction and the natural world. These mostly untitled
pieces arrive at the end of an obsessive process that begins
with panels prepped with vinyl, latex primer, and gesso, and
proceed through up to 100 layers of airbrushed oil paint and
petroleum-based glaze. The paintings are meticulous and
time-intensive—in 2005, Macca mounted a show entitled
“Flotsam,” composed entirely of multi-media conceptual works
he executed during his off-time, while his abstract paintings
were drying. The imagery of the pieces themselves lends to
ocular interpretations—“Eyeballs,” pronounced one gallery-goer
on opening night—evoking pupil, iris, and conjunctiva, or,
more menacingly, the implacable robot eye of the HAL 9000
computer in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space
Odyssey.”
The predominantly muted color palette
(mustard rather than lemon yellow, salmon rather than pink,
mint rather than kelly green) betray the artist’s fascination
with death and decay in the plant and animal kingdoms, wherein
the saturation of youthful bloom yields to obsolescence’s
ashen pall. “In my paintings,” he writes, “the soft gradations
of color are intended to represent the transformation of life
to death to rebirth.” No doubt the works, with their woozily
geometric, Op-like repetitions, would glamorize and pop in a
bolder palette, yet Macca’s subtler approach is more in
keeping with his thematic preoccupations, as well as with PDX
director Jane Beebe’s oft-invoked mantra of “quiet art.”
Largely uniform in their compositional schema, with circles
radiating outward from the panels’ horizontal and vertical
midpoints, the works sometimes depart from symmetry to
enlivening effect, as in the vertical plank-like Rabbit, its
two panels suggest sunrise and sunset. The nine-panel
Instrumental also breaks up the homogeneity with witty,
locomotive rhythm. While Macca’s métier would perhaps benefit
from even more compositional and chromatic variation, on the
whole the painter succeeds in presenting an iconic visual
language: rigorously delimited, fastidiously executed, and
strangely, yearningly affective.
–Richard Speer
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