J. John Priola’s recent photographs at the Schneider Gallery show a wonderful gain in refinement over his strong, rather blunt work from the 1990s that is being shown in the back room.
At the end of the decade, his large black-and-white prints began to present such minimal subjects as cracks and smudges on white walls. Some of these are included in the exhibition, and they now look transitional to a world of greater subtlety in light and shadow.
Priola’s new pieces all treat aspects of dwellings: street numbers or objects glimpsed through windows. Both are only of nominal interest. The achievement of the photographs is in how they reduce banal elements in each piece to near-perfect purist abstractions.
In the window shots, that is managed while retaining an aspect of voyeurism, for they all are night pictures perceived from afar and given broad black surrounds. The prints of illuminated numbers are more atmospheric and innocent, though they, too, are nocturnes and remotely suggest the atmosphere of California film noir.
There is, of course, no narrative, for despite the voyeuristic ripple, Priola’s pictures are poetic meditations, as it were, on degrees of black. The romantic symbolism of, say, Paul Verlaine’s “A Great Black Sleep” has here been turned into something domestic but rich and, at times, diamond-hard.
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At 230 W. Superior St., through Feb. 22. 312-988-4033.
Daniel Bodner
Daniel Bodner’s new works on canvas at the Roy Boyd Gallery are much like his older paintings of figures that seem to have coalesced in empty spaces and are being eaten away. Their debt to photography remains clear, as does the thickness of their paint application that allows glimmers of color to emerge from underlying, less chromatically subdued layers.
Most of the figures still are male nudes that communicate their relationships to one another through adjustments in position and posture. A nod toward the paintings of Alberto Giacometti continues to be seen, as is the possibility that the effect of some pieces is meant to be at once physical, psychological, allegorical and symbolic.
The biggest change is that Bodner has clothed some of his figures and set them in a confined space alongside a lectern. This suggests not only an interior–Bodner has done them before–but also a public space like a speaker’s platform. The figures, singly or in pairs, address an audience frontally, forever frozen in the moment of silence before a speech begins.
This relates to certain paintings of figures by Francis Bacon, though there’s no hint of Bacon’s violence. Instead, the works’ relationship to photographs is strengthened through having the lectern resemble elaborate props recalled from daguerreotypes of famous orators. The effect is both familiar and distanced, only suggesting the existential anxiety that for some years has been Bodner’s forte.
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At 739 N. Wells, through Feb. 18. 312-642-1606.
Antonia Contro
In the 1990s, Antonia Contro was a painter who moved from lush surfaces to a drier style before regaining sensuousness through Polaroid photography. Her exhibition at the Carrie Secrist Gallery shows a little of all of that, plus a development toward audio-visual pieces.
The unifying factor was a stay in Bellagio, Italy, that came through a grant last year. The work on view was done on the grant and shows the influence of the Italian landscape.
Exceptions are ink-and-watercolor drawings of knots that Contro presents on a long horizontal scroll and in a grid. Even these, however, look like collections of jottings, thereby coming into line with the landscape imagery that gives the exhibition the character of a diary.
The most handsome pieces are books of notations; their artful design gives an overarching sense of form to what otherwise are Contro’s raw materials, photographs and preparatory drawings. However, the centerpiece of the show is more ambitious, a collaboration with sound artist Lou Malozzi.
This combines six light-box images of landscape elements with four tracks of sound played concurrently. Two tracks about plants are juxtaposed with a child singing “Santa Lucia” and readings from Ovid’s “Metamorphosis.” The effort of sorting them out requires more of the audience than Contro’s images, which take a subsidiary role that probably was not desired but is appropriate to their slightness as visual objects.
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At 300 W. Superior St., through Feb. 8. 312-280-4500.
