Upwind, on 29th Street, the Calix Gustav Gallery opts for a modest group show featuring a trio of artists tackling the inexorable tides of time and the catastrophic effects of man on nature and personal tragedy.
"The Passing" features work by Jovan Karlo Villalba, Catalina Jaramillo, and Richard Herzog.
The Ecuadorian-born Villalba is represented by sprawling, cinematic paintings that engulf the viewer and depict threats of biological and nuclear warfare, environmental catastrophe, or economic ruin.
In Lost City, a sprawling, nightmarish vision of an apocalyptic future, colors slash across the canvas in wildly aggressive flannel gray, flesh pink, and African violet to conjure a devastated metropolis looming from beyond a gnarled copse of trees heralding man's emergence from a dystopian oblivion of his own creation.
Likewise in his Death of an Artist's Studio, Villalba slings paint with the reckless abandon of someone petrified by fear of impending doom. The painting conveys the aftereffects of a mortar assault on the building materials aisle of your corner Home Depot.
By contrast, Herzog's sculptures of botanical experiments gone awry exude a much less violent sensibility. His Flowering Ivy Shoots climbs against a wall much like a tangle of kudzu and is crafted from a blister of snaking wood and metal triangles melding into abstract tetrahedrons telegraphing a math nut's cranial gear box.
Mondays-Sundays. Starts: July 10. Continues through Sept. 1, 2010