Painter’s exhibit has
something for everyone
You might think painting’s an easy enough task, if you’re not a painter. Pick a subject, dip brush in medium, apply color to canvas and voila — something to hang on the wall. But for an artist, painting is an occupation. Day in, day out, it needs to be accomplished. How to keep on doing that is what all painters must figure out for themselves. Some keep their tricks private, others put them on display. Candida Alvarez has loads, and they’re all on view in one of the summer’s most purely pleasurable exhibitions.
Up through this Sunday, “Candida Alvarez: Here” surveys the artist’s ebullient work at the Chicago Cultural Center. After four decades of unstinting production but too little representation, Alvarez is enjoying something of a comeback. After a well-received show at the Hyde Park Art Center five years ago, her paintings have since been included in an important survey of abstraction at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo., and adapted by avant-garde Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo.
The Cultural Center show is curated by Terry R. Myers, a colleague of Alvarez’s at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has taught for the past two decades. Alvarez’s students must pinch themselves all semester long for having lucked into a teacher who gives permission so readily: The artist can’t be said to have a style so much as to possess a willingness to try out any and all possibilities that come her way. Uninformed viewers might think they’ve wandered into a group show, with ironic paint-by-numbers pictures set alongside moody figurations, off-color grids, and collages of pencil shavings, shells and lace. Even if you, like me, don’t fancy the kind of magical realism Alvarez was painting in the ’80s, you’re bound to find plenty else to relish. There’s something here for everyone.
Alvarez was born in Brooklyn in 1955 to Puerto Rican parents who’d fallen in love on the plane trip stateside. After an early stint as a curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York and some time spent as a minor artist in the city’s bustling ’80s gallery scene, Alvarez found herself in New Haven, Conn., where she and her husband, photographer Dawoud Bey, had moved with their 7-month-old son so Bey could study at the Yale School of Art. Alvarez ended up getting a degree, too, under the tutelage of an eclectic group of painters including language artist Mel Bochner, political abstractionist Howardena Pindell and the ever-provisional Rochelle Feinstein. One move to Chicago, one tenure-track position as a professor of art and one divorce later, here she is. Through it all she has kept on painting, no matter what, somehow, and about anything, which has eventually meant just about everything. Family, friends, songs, nature, books, games, post-colonialism, feminism, domesticity, death — it’s all there, in one painting or another.
It’s on the baseboards as well. As a spinoff of a 2009 canvas that’s not included in the exhibition, Alvarez printed a black, dark gray, yellow and white camouflage-esque pattern on vinyl and adhered it to the moldings that run along the bottom of the gallery walls. The effect is immediately endearing. For all the seriousness of purpose it demands to make a life as an artist, a bit of levity can go a long way. Alvarez has it in heaps: a serene, diamond-shaped panel filled with luminous circles hangs way up high, as if bumped there by the large electrical panel that takes its rightful place below. Another gets its circles, and their composition, from a random tossing of pennies inspired by a pastime popular among Alvarez’s graduate school studio mates in the mid-’90s. Nearby pictures derive their titles from the number of circles that fill them (12 striped discs equal the letter “L” for Louise, a beloved hat-wearing auntie).
The vermilion and lilac that color those stripes are not an obviously winning combination, not together and even less so with the addition of a swath of wheat beneath. And yet, like many of Alvarez’s palettes, they’re weird enough to be genuinely energizing. The recent “Rainbows on my studio floor” traces a dizzyingly receding pattern of parallelograms in every kid’s favorite shades, inexplicably outlined in baby blue. The immense “swarm,” from 2011, sandwiches together drippy, jagged layers of mustard, olive, magenta, burgundy, black, ultramarine blue with a squirt of orange, and a topping of creamy gray that blends in with the walls.
Amid these colors and shapes creeps in the familiar world, sometimes recognizably, sometimes less so: the open casket at a grandfather’s funeral forms from the shimmery dabs of multihued paint; a lone copy of Cezanne’s “The Bather” coalesces from hundreds of tiny gluey scraps of magazine pages.
Sometimes what results is less the look of the world than its feel. “Chill,” a colossal wall of slick white and gray, with streaks of sky blue and sunshine yellow, is. Situations, feelings and things have colors, as does “Listening to Haruki Murakami while looking at a sunset.” That’s a painting of Alvarez’s from 2016, set to the alarmingly soothing and smoggy pastel grid that could be a graphic distillation of Murakami’s epic dystopian novel “IQ84.”
The Murakami grid isn’t perfect. It droops a bit on the lower left, thankfully. Flawless geometric abstractions can be so hard to identify with — aspire to, yes, but not relate to. Alvarez remains approachable always. “Intention,” a wee construction of nails and string on mauve-painted wood, would be given the bum’s rush at a macrame convention. “Jive,” a 6-by-7-foot unfinished honeycomb pattern, would keep the bees waiting.
Back to the studio, then.
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