One Too Many Scary Movies
David Markus
Film director David Lynch, more than any other contemporary American artist, has the ability to inflect the normalcy of everyday existence with estrangement and horror. When, in the opening minutes of Blue Velvet, his camera plunges into the green folds of one freshly manicured lawn to reveal–behind the curtain of a picture perfect habitude–a swath of hellish insects, the seeming mansuetude of suburban life is grotesquely brought into question.
Richard Pasquarelli does not deal explicitly with the grotesque, but it is clear from the tone of his artwork that he has seen one too many scary movies. His medium-sized panels contain photographic images painstakingly rendered in unblended slabs of enamel. Their colors are mute; their settings are laden with the inscrutable lambency of twilight. Though nothing ostensibly sinister takes place in Pasquarelli’s works, each one carries with it a glint of mystery–the potentiality of horror. In their cinematic renderings of the mundane, his works invoke a strange mixture of familiarity and unease, like the two-sided blade of a nostalgic memory, culled from an imperfect childhood.
"Random Allegories" is an appropriate title for a show whose individual works rarely convey more than a hermetic and carefully ambiguous set of ramifications. Isolation is the overarching theme. Malice, though hinted at, is continuously revealed as a manifestation of the viewer’s imagination. What is so threatening about a darkened stairway (as in Man Ascending Stairs)? Is it fear of the unknown? Association with the shock conventions of Hollywood horror films? Or is it simply that long shadows and muted colors have an inherently nightmarish aesthetic quality? These are the questions posed by the artist’s works.
Painting from his home in Hoboken, Pasquarelli is aware of the estrangement that accompanies modern living both in and out of the city. Although his work tends more toward the particular sort of alienation foretold by the suburban landscape, his artistic sensibilities survive the urban commute. A vehicle parked in an abandoned field at dusk and infused with the gothic loneliness of a Winslow Homer painting delivers the same subdued impact as the depiction of a lone figure in a subway car whose blank stare is indicative of his transient emotional state.
It would be difficult to argue that the sense of estrangement conveyed in these works is of a purely empathetic sort; that Pasquarelli’s paintings do not also reflect the artist’s own sense of alienation toward his surroundings. When the bulk of an artist’s work retains, in the intimacy of its subject matter or the oblique vantages of its compositions, something of the presence of its maker (in this case, the man behind the camera/paintbrush), the viewer cannot help but conceive of the given subject as one glimpsed through the artist’s psyche. In the work of Lee Friedlander, one is painfully aware of the loneliness, not just of the subjects depicted (albeit they are sometimes Friedlander himself), but of the person who has chosen to fasten upon them. Hannah Arendt writes about society’s tendency to create important artists and intellectuals out of those "who have been most remote from it, and who therefore have suffered most." Pasquarelli seems eager to exploit the creative potential of this alienated status, but he is simultaneously content to linger within the circumscribed boundaries of domestic life.
Lock Box, a depiction of a crowded closet from whose blown-white ceiling hangs the sinewy draw cord of an electric fixture, might appear to reference Phillip Guston’s ubiquitous personalized symbol: the closet light bulb, associated with creative impetus, which is later transformed into a noose so as to establish a link between the inspiration and the suffering of an artistic mind. But it is clear that Pasquarelli’s iconography is less art historical than filmic. Moreover, he does not possess the self-involvement required to advance ideas directly related to the creative process. This is refreshing, in one sense, but also limiting. Regarding the painting in question, Pasquarelli merely wants us to speculate upon the contents of the small metallic box positioned at the composition’s perspectival apex. A gun? Bribe money? Or simply a collection of antique postcards? It is an effective ploy to enlist our curiosity, but removed from any narrative context, its imaginative possibilities quickly expire. The same is true of Feet–a depiction of a tile floor and a pair of naked legs truncated at the knee by the bottom edge of the canvas. The image is vintage Hitchcock. Or is it? After our macabre thoughts have played themselves out, the image just as easily resembles the legs of a mother kneeling on the bathroom floor to bathe her child.
Pasquarelli has a masterful sense of his unique enamel medium; the surfaces of his paintings are as absent of the artist’s touch as the lacquer on a brand new Chevrolet. He knows very well how to capture a creepy mood. But he is too diffident a spokesperson for the alienated set to point, as Lynch does, to the corruption of society’s moral fabric; he is too cozy in his phantasmagoric, though ultimately innocuous, bourgeois regiment to deliver the desperate estrangement of, say, Stan Brackage. His rather pedestrian concern with the eerie moments in everyday life–as curios, not monoliths–places him closer, in artistic approach, to the surrealists. Indeed, Magritte’s L’empire des lumieres–a painting of a stately waterfront house whose shadowy façade and illuminated windows are at odds with the day-blue sky above–seems the most obvious painterly antecedent to Pasquarelli’s oeuvre. Here it is a contrived disjointedness that masks an otherwise harmless scene–an inversion of the Lynchian procedure I stated earlier. The works of "Random Allegories" effectively convey the strange sensations that accompany an incomplete narrative or a liminal psychological space, but they are content to leave it at that. Ultimately, dawn will turn to day, the man will ascend the stairs without treachery, and the hobgoblins of our imagination will be revealed as so much shadow and light.
