Rougette Gallery
| Signs
and Wonders The
Paintings of Jesse Reno People are wilder than we have been taught to be, says Jesse Reno, and in more danger than we know. Only he says it in his paintings rather than in any kind of political tract. My first encounter with Reno's unusual images produced, in my own mind, memories of pictures I have seen of cave prehistoric paintings. Flat and two-dimensional, and with various stark and half-way recognizable elements placed in odd relationships to each other, Reno's images easily conjure up for me the very shadows that must have danced in the firelight as the men and women of Lascaux in France painted their animals and stick figures those thousands of years ago. Here are some of the words and notes I wrote down in response to seeing a half dozen of the paintings that are in this show at Rougette Gallery: Medieval flatness, cave flatness. The horned man. Indian headdresses and an eagle carved in the style peculiar to the Pacific Northwest Indian. Totems. Saint with halo, and the devil at Coventry cathedral. The minotaur, and the price code bar symbol. Rail tracks and city blocks in symbol. Blind heads in ornate headdresses, following stars. The consuming spider and the consumer's price code. Winged man with the symbol of the flower or the atom. Cave walls. I was particularly please to find, when I looked up Reno's biography, that he lives in Portland, Ore., and that my sense about the Pacific Northwest was apparently on the mark. But this is not really about me reading another man's signs and wonders, rather it is about the artist's world and how accessible it is to the rest of us. Taken as a whole, the list of words and impressions given above holds together with a remarkable consistency. Here are ideas connected to a more primitive idea of our species, although not necessarily to an ancient idea. Reno successfully blends images as old as the devil with representations of the universal UPC symbol, the little black bars found on all the products of our modern lives that are scanned at supermarket checkouts. The implication is clear, that perhaps these are two forms of the same devil. What we have, then, seems to be a fairly open and critical commentary on aspects of contemporary life. But as I keep reminding myself, looking at art is not simply a matter of decoding the symbols it appears to contain. True, the appearance of a minotaur-like creature in one painting speaks to me of the terrifying labyrinthine trap described in the ancient Mediterranean legend of Crete. The horned man belongs to the pre-Christian world of the Celts. The devil, who is his own kind of horned man, still holds such a place in our current library of ideas that he does not much need to be explained. It is also true that Reno openly ascribes literal meaning to some of the symbolic shapes that he uses in his paintings. But this is not some Mad Hatter's idea of the Da Vinci Code, promising to lead us to some fantastic and shattering final conclusion. Art is intended to steer people toward their own private conclusions, or at least to get them moving in some direction. And there is no obligation to ever arrive, not even to move in the same direction as anybody else. Ultimately, once art is completed by the artist, then art is exclusively for the viewer's own purposes. The artist's skill or craftsmanship, however, does survive the completion of each painting, and deserves its own consideration. These are extremely powerful and visceral paintings, not simply for the images and ideas they have conjured up in my mind as a viewer, but also because of the literal effect of the artist's choices in bringing them to life on his canvases. Some of the excellently outlandish figures in Reno's paintings remind me of the carefully distorted or rearranged representations produced by Alan Magee, for example. The apparent connection between the two artists? styles, which after all might exist only in my own opinion, helps me realize the universal nature of the things that artists (people, really) have within us, the things which we find ourselves dealing with. While I am more than happy to laugh at the Da Vinci Code theory of the meaning of life, (it has more in common with Monty Python's theory than anything else,) I do believe that good art will demonstrate the identifiable humanness of the artist behind all the shades and colors, forms and figures, that appear in the art. Reno's art has this quality. It is real, and it is about something we all know is real, the fears and terrors that have followed us as a species from the caves we once lived in, and which strips away our modern disguise. It therefore looks ferociously attractive, appealingly terrifying, like the urge to lean too far over a precipice is also appealingly terrifying. These are indeed wild images that Reno paints on his equivalent of the ancient cave wall. He paints to warn us of the power of the hunt and of the hunter, even if our version of the hunt is more prosaic than the primal pursuit of the mammoth and the giant aurochs. He paints to make us fear the hunt, nevertheless, and so to overcome our fear ? or be ruined by it. August 2007 David Grima Editor The Camden Herald Maine USA |