I left NJ early enough to meet my friend Cicely Cottingham on the train - arriving at Penn Station, NY around noon. It was a lovely day - the light was mellow - the air was clear and happily not too hot, and I had the opportunity to have a cherished long-time friend all to myself to catch up on art, life, and politics. We were on our way to Brooklyn (Gowanus) to see Bascha Mon’s first one-person exhibition in NYC in a long time. She and I have known each other for many years and I vividly recollect attending her inaugural show at Lee Ault Gallery about fifty years ago.
The car ride out to Brooklyn gave me an opportunity to see parts of the Borough I had not visited in years and the contrasts were both stunning and jarring. Construction was evident everywhere, the sound of drilling shattering conversations, and again I was struck by the stillness of the wide streets that felt like Midwest plains - a dry flat emptiness of low-lying factories/shops that seemed to extend beyond the horizon into realms of secrets and challenges.
Arriving at an industrial area where the Gallery, Tappeto Volante is located we entered a cosmos of blazing color and swirling shapes installed in a space that did not disavow its machine-based origins. Paintings, drawings on paper, and canvases varying in size from a tiny glowing yellow gem to two larger works affixed with “hitchhikers”- smaller works like magnets hovering around the edges of “the mother ship” - a few able to attach themselves, adding myriad layers of cohesiveness to the work. In some of these paintings you realize dreams have been dissolved into viscous paint and a face, bird or fish will emerge ghostlike haunting the artist’s psyche.
Going into the second room I felt time had been erased when I saw the group of larger, harmonic, and more tonal paintings - many in values of delicate blues and grays produced on a building material - homasote which absorbs and fuses the paint invoking a world bathed in muted light. Flecks of patterning and references to flying fishes, acreages of farmland, and buildings, all co-mingle into Bascha’s wildly hermetic vision. Nature as seen through the eyes of a child discovering it for the first time - but with complexity interwoven with naiveté.
Before going home Cicely and I found a great Pizzeria and gobbled up delicious slices of spinach pizza-the best I ever had topping off a lovely day!
Please click or copy the link for images and more information.
https://tappetovolantegallery.com/exhibitions/bascha-mon-solo-show
