The end of the modern movement brought about a new acceptance for styles that long were disregarded or disparaged. Magic realism is one of those styles, and Leopold Segedin’s mixed-media paintings at the Byron Roche Gallery are distinguished examples.
The textbook definition for magic realism has been since the 1940s: “a meticulously rendered, naturalistic style of painting that usually carries an intensity of mood.” This is relevant to all of Segedin’s contemporary pieces, which because they deal with memories of the West Side of Chicago, look as if they actually came from the heyday of magic realism, when Ben Shahn and Andrew Wyeth were among its practitioners.
There is little “surreal” about Segedin’s paintings. Their force comes from a strangeness based on past time and its modes of life. The landscape of Chicago in the ’40s is heightened by the artist’s precision and brilliant color. Only occasionally, as when he renders an “L” train to look like a toy, do the pictures contain elements that appear deliberately odd or unnatural.
Intensity of mood sometimes distracts from the masterly construction of Segedin’s “L”-station paintings, which has much in common with hard-edged geometric abstract canvases. I suspect that because he is a humanist the artist would resist this idea, but the proof is in three paintings — two vertical, one horizontal — that captivate as much through minute adjustments of architectural form as through human drama.
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At 750 N. Franklin St., through April 26. 312-654-0144.
Bill Zima
Bill Zima’s recent paintings at Perimeter Gallery are all abstractions in encaustic, a venerable process of painting with wax colors that are fixed with heat. Each panel has one dominant color and an all-over pattern in black. However, the patterns are not on the surface as much as in it, resembling various gouges and pockmarks found in stuccoed walls or such natural substances as wood and stone.
The paintings have been achieved layer by layer, which gives two strong optical benefits — one regarding pattern, the other, color. Both suggest something deep in the surface that’s in counterpoint with visual stimuli on subsequent layers. This gives an added direction to the pattern or delicate contrasting accents to the overall color.
In a single panel, the effect is rich enough. But Zima also creates triptychs and polyptychs that present visual feasts akin to inlaid marble pavements. Each is achieved with restraint, yet the impression of a decorative impulse persists, tainting the enterprise by somehow making it seem easier than it is. Some viewers thus will come away moved less by the work’s visual intelligence than by its seductiveness, which can make it appear as primarily a high-toned complement to interior design.
What a pity that the most daring art of the 20th Century has led us to be wary of work that’s unmistakably beautiful.
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At 210 W. Superior St., through April 20. 312-266-7984.
`Beauty in Ruins’
“Beauty in Ruins,” at the Architech Gallery, is a deceptively simple group show that focuses on fragments of buildings. In many cases, the fragments have survived for long periods of time, becoming virtual shrines. In other instances, the artist has been witness to fragments in the making, capturing complete or near-complete buildings in the act of being torn down.
Nearly all of the 40 prints, drawings and photographs prove as strong formally as they are in documentary interest. But because they come from four centuries and at least as many cultures, they engage other issues not immediately apparent. Embedded in various pieces are attitudes toward the antique world, travel and an aesthetic based on incompleteness that now are foreign to us and endlessly fascinating.
For example, in England at the time of the Romantic Movement, ideas about incompleteness held such appeal that fake ruins were built and poems written to appear part of a larger whole that had been destroyed or lost. So how early 19th Century British artists approached the actual ruins of antiquity was very different from how artists did in other cultures at other times. By bringing together British, French and Italian artists from the 18th through the 20th centuries, an exhibition high in aesthetic appeal also becomes a spur toward exploration of a sort we hadn’t imagined.
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At 730 N. Franklin St., through June 1. 312-475-1290.
