The Genevieve Arnold show
The Genevieve Arnold show now at the Kiang Gallery on Peachtree Road in Atlanta is an assortment of what Arnold calls landscape paintings (though more traditionally understood as abstracted fields much like the paintings of G. Richter). The paintings can be read as landscapes dually, as discrepancies of surface and pattern, or by abstractions of terrestrial landscapes that are indicated by their respective unabstracted sources.
Contrary to my laudatory consumption of more open works of expression, I appreciated the didactic juxtapositions of source material and culled abstraction, possibly due to the character and mood capabilities of the sources (which incidentally were soft pencil sketches by the artist, making one feel that the source was in fact the artist’s sense and not a concrete thing we would approach in the world) and also due to the capacity for empathy with the intense moods of the abstractions, which we may have overlooked had there not been this soft key. I am not sure this is quite a necessity or a burgeoning norm for didacticism or processional tracery in art, but as a punctuation, it was refreshing.
