Rosalux Gallery opens their November show featuring James Wrayge and John Diebel this (Saturday, Nov. 10) evening with a reception from 7 to 11 p.m. The gallery is located in the Open Book Building, 1011 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis. Also this weekend in the Open Book: The Book Arts Festival, featuring handmade books, letterpress cards, books and posters, and other book- and print-related items by local artists, 10-5 Saturday and noon-5 Sunday.
I visited the Open Book building earlier this week and so made my way into Rosalux Gallery to preview the November show. Rosalux always pairs two of their member artists in each show, and though it’s often apparent why the two featured are being shown together, it is not so obvious to me this time. The relationship of the two artists’ works notwithstanding, both are well worth seeing, and both draw the viewer in for very different reasons and in very different ways.
But I must make a little digression before telling you about the works on display here. I was recently at a local café with my 17-year-old son, and on the wall were abstract artworks in a monochromatic palette featuring a repeating pattern. My son was quick to comment that he failed to see how this was art. Art or not art, I had to agree it wasn’t very interesting to look at -- I thought it would make nice wallpaper or wrapping paper but was not suited to being set within a frame and displayed for our contemplation. There was nothing to contemplate.
In contrast, Wrayge’s abstract oil paintings on canvas present the viewer with not only a pleasing arrangement of color and form, but also with the suggestion of a story, an idea, or that inexplicable something that makes you want to stand in front of a painting for a while and ponder it.
It helps that they all have titles, which offer you a glimpse into the artist’s thoughts about the painting (it is one of my pet peeves that artists so often cop out by naming their works Untitled). It doesn’t hurt that Wrayge’s titles are sometimes cryptic, giving you something to wonder about; consider Archie, for example. It is mostly sky blue, and the texture of the paint with both white and blue streaks suggests turbulent water or storm clouds. Behind this we catch a glimpse of rusts and browns, mostly obscured by the blue-white something that has swept over them. A few spare lines hint at a boxy space amidst it all. But where’s Archie in all this?
The Sienna series employs what would appear to be his favorite color palette, at least in this show. Deep rusts and oranges predominate (as the name would suggest), each occupies about one square foot and is spare in its composition. Sienna #2 resembles rusted metal plates, such as you might find amongst the bridge debris by the river. Sienna #6 employs the briefest patch of smudged charcoal and two perpendicular lines to lead the eye into a suggestion of a room within this pool of rust.
In all of these paintings, Wrayge has created blocky, texture-rich compositions employing deep colors; rusty sienna dominates many of them, though another set offers mostly cool colors.
On the other hand, Diebel’s mixed media compositions tell stories about the gritty history of Minneapolis’s North Loop in the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. His drawings in a vintage illustration style could have been lifted directly from the newspapers of that era (in fact, I had to examine them closely to determine that they really were new drawings and not images cut from the newspapers and other documents that also contribute to these collages).
Images of people are juxtaposed with and drawn on top of ephemera from this era. He depicts the events and changes that were happening downtown, with a sympathetic eye to the laborites and down-and-outers who hung around the old Gateway Park, or struggled to get by in blue-color jobs, or found a momentary escape in the seamier downtown business activities. The 1934 truckers’ strike is featured in a very large composition, “Strike, 1934,” that swirls with action and conflict.
“Future Perfect” features drawings of very modern downtown office buildings as they might have been envisioned in the 1950s, when city planners were so eager to tear down the old buildings, and often did, to replace them with clean, soulless modern glass-and-steel skyscrapers. A confident and leisured upper-class 1950s couple dominate the foreground while an old-timer looks on -- observing dispassionately, it seems, the passing of an era.
Both artists create pleasing compositions, use color well, and give viewers something to think about. I guess that’s what they have in common.
Although the opening for this show starts at 7 p.m. Saturday, you might want to come earlier to browse the Book Arts Festival, which ends at 5 p.m. You could go over to Spill the Wine at 11th and Washington to have a bite to eat between events.
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