At the Beach with Dellamarie Parilli and Thomas Nuzum - Ann Landi and Edward Rubin

At the Beach with Dellamarie Parilli and Thomas Nuzum – Ann Landi and Edward Rubin

    Marijana Bego, the ebullient director of the Ezair Gallery at the beach community of Southampton, could not have selected a more refreshing pairing for their August summer show than that of painters Dellamarie Parilli and Thomas Nuzum. Nor could the artists, both of whom live overlooking water in their home states, have asked for a more charming at-home feeling gallery in which to hang their work. Situated on Main Street, the two-year old gallery occupies the entire first floor of an old country house. With two oddly shaped exhibition rooms and a small and narrow balcony, the viewer is offered a rabbit warren of visual treats.
    Thomas Nuzum lives with his wife and daughter and a slew of cats and dogs on the shore of Myers Lake near Flint, Michigan. Nuzum, who began his career 40 years ago in the San Francisco Bay Area where he received an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, has tackled every school of art from abstract to figurative. In this show, using his own pets as a jump-off point, Nuzum has painted a series of slightly surrealistic and often mysterious dog narratives. While the artist’s inviting use of space and shifting angles give off near-cinematic spatial illusions, the dogs definitely have their day. The expression on each face is one of extreme intelligence—most seem to be actively considering their situations and they drive the viewer to do the same.
    In Big Dog, Little Red Book, one of Nuzum’s more powerful images, the viewer is confronted with a large white dog and Chairman Mao’s little red book. From the imposing dog to Mao’s enigmatic treatise, we are asked to finish the story. In Rug Rat Terrier, the artist plays with words and images as he does in many of his paintings while depicting a small terrier with a large pink toy rat resting at its feet. The artist here offers us both the innocence of childhood and the menace that real rodents conjure up. In Dock Dog, a small pup standing on a dock on the lake appears to be receding into the water itself. He beckons us to follow him into another world, another dimension. Like all of Nuzum’s highly persuasive dog paintings, we have no choice. We can’t help writing ourselves into his stories.
    Dellamarie Parrilli’s “stories” are of a different sort altogether, conjuring the ghosts of the last century. Nearly six decades after masters like Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and others established signature styles that would earn a generation of painters the rubric of Abstract Expressionism, one would have thought the impulses to drip, splatter, slash and dribble would have completely played themselves out. The heirs to that movement were so numerous, and their critics so staunch, that a backlash was bound to happen (as indeed it did when a brash young Robert Rauschenberg famously erased one of de Kooning’s drawings). Nevertheless, a second, third and even fourth generation has kept the AbEx torch aglow.
    And then along comes an artist like Parilli, who is entirely self-taught and by and large unaware of the major currents that shaped 20th century art. Biography is not always relevant to aesthetic understanding, but hers does shed some light on how she comes by the audacity to tackle seemingly worn-out formulas, to give them a mighty shake, and to conjure up something that is all her own.
    Parrilli, who lives in Chicago, was a promising singer, dancer and actress when she contracted a life-threatening mold infection a few years ago. She turned to painting to find another way, as she puts it, “to connect with others and invite dialogue.” She has always worked as an abstract painter, but has explored different styles that invite comparison with Pollock, Mark Tobey and even early Rothko. Her mastery of spontaneous image making has grown ever more sure in the last couple of years, and the paintings she exhibited here are among the best she has ever done.
    These works, all on the small side (approximate 20” x 24”) and mostly squarish in format, were each painted in 2006. The most buoyant of the works—such as Asian Dreams, Wind Song, and Dolphin Dance—combine stains of luminous, neon color with drips and splatters in yellow, black and lime green. The upshot is a lyrical intensity and chromatic brilliance that occasionally rivals Kandinsky. There are also hints of Far Eastern influences in the Zen-like calligraphic, central image of Alpha Omega and in the colors and vertical format of Asian Dreams, which calls to mind a panel from a Chinese or Japanese screen painting.
   Parrilli is on less certain ground in a pair of canvases called Mosaico and Memoirs, which feature a dense, meshlike pattern of dark, dripped paint with brighter tones beneath. The results are more muddy than intriguing and, in a near-monochromatic painting, Here and Now, although lovely in its slashing brushwork, cries out for a bit more bravery in its range of hues. But, on the whole, this is nonetheless an impressive showing from an artist who is finding fertile stretches in this well-worn territory.