Saint Agnes
oil on paper
12 x 9
2006

Art New England, February/March 2007

NARRATIVE/TRANSFORMATIONS
at Three Graces Gallery, Portsmouth

     Three artists contribute to this themed show in which traditional allegorical subjects are updated by virtue of style or association, creating an imaginative, sometimes quirky compilation of images.
      Mel Zabarsky's contribution is a series of oil paintings mainly portraying the apocryphal story of Susannah and the Elders, a subject that artists over the centuries have interpreted in very different ways, both thematically and visually. Here, the garden in whose pool Susannah bathes is dark and rich with pigment, a stage on which the drama of her discovery by the Elders is spotlighted. As the Elders accost her, the characters in the drama often seem transformed, as if they are in a dream-garden, reflecting not only the story's traditional themes of innocence, treachery, and justice, but an inner, psychological narrative set in contemporary costume.
     Several oil paintings by Joyce Reopel create another dreamlike world, an Arcadia populated by Rubenesque nudes who, in an Ovidian sort of way, intertwine with trees and vines. Painted in austere, unsaturated tones, forms sometimes become indistinguishable, morphing into or suggesting other forms - but always there is the sense of voluptuous luxury and surgin life. Tree Nymph, for example, depicts, from an elevated perspective, a nude cradled in the boughs of a tree whose branches vaguely coalesce with her own "limbs".
     Gallery owner Kim Ferreira contributes a series of small, standing self-portraits in the guise of various saints, each with traditional symbolic attribute. In the context of the paintings' contemporary style and feel, the attribute - the Satanic dragon under St. Michael's feet, for example - takes on ironic or humorous overtones. Perhaps the artist is trying on, momentarily, each saint's persona to see how it fits in the modern world. The traditional spiked wheel associated with St. Catherine of Alexandria, here seems to have been removed from a bicycle. St. Agnes holds an enormous, fluffy, stuffed toy lamb, whose wide-eyed expression seems to say, "What am I doing here?"

Robert R. Craven