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REVIEWS - VAN STOKES
A DIALOGUE
By Van Stokes
There is much I know about the artist Xela from his images. They are full of color, wit, history and irreverence. But today we sit down so that I might investigate further.
"I began my career as a political cartoonist," he says as we order an espresso. He admits to a preference for candor and a weakness for the light-hearted.
Xela becomes animated as he speaks about painting and history. He describes personal inspirations through an intriguing mix of people, events and the nobility of everyday life.
Xela's anecdotes conjure up fascinating word pictures. His convictions are stated with great lust for life but also an appreciation of subtlety. Much like his artwork, his words are redemptive in spirit.
We discuss the Bauhaus and its lessons on the psychology of seeing. "But it's also about letting the sun into the room," says Xela with a smile.
And this is true. Klee, Albers, Kandinsky, Itten and Xela all create art as a phenomenological gift - a graceful combination of the physical and the psychological.
These are the simple elegant tenets of modern picture making found in Xela's work. His paintings are refreshingly free of post-modern verbiage and appropriated this and that.
Still, the work engages a dialogue of signs and symbols - one that embraces its subject rather than deconstructs it.
He begins with drawings that are later transformed into an industrial vinyl skin. The result is a collage of authoritative flat shapes. It is a rigorous construct that formally binds his work.
In the paintings "Berlin Kulturforum 1" and "Berlin Kulturforum 2," Xela explores the formal and subjective dynamic of Berlin's Kulturforum, constructed of warehouse forms as painted statements of progressive architecture.
Xela's relationship to the forms is remarkable as both painter and Bauhaus proponent.
"Kulturforum 1" depicts the cool geometric landscape of the buildings that house the institutions, while "Kulturforum 2" injects the subject matter with a befitting Bauhaus-inspired non-objective quality. There is a lively push-pull of figure-ground, geometric shapes and furious architectural line that almost obscures the subject matter.
Works like "United(?) Nations" depict nations and global unity in an almost humorous light. On top of a late-cubist puzzle of brightly hued colors reside over a thousand drawn faces.
Xela's view of the world replaces division with overlap, clarity with creative liberty, and individualism with pleasant likeness. It is a marvelous exercise in displaying co-existence as an innately human desire. Xela's perspective leaves the viewer chuckling at the state of the world rather than pondering divisive issues.
One formal and conceptual step away from "United(?) Nations" is Xela's "Demographics." This painting combines concepts of communal structure with field painting. Order, anomaly and Gestalt space are practiced with excellent results. Subtle unit forms comprise a plastic whole.
The title "Demographics" clarifies the relationship of shapes to individual people. There is continuity with small sections of difference. Shapes are created casually in a Matissean fashion , but their raison d'etre is born of Xela's own vision.
The painting "Sunrise" is a distilled dose of Xela's core sensibilities - powerful color and line applied to recreate familiar subject matter. With just three generous skeins of color as ground, a horizon and an evening time atmosphere are denoted. With all the allure of commercial signage, but with an equally attractive economy of means, Xela's shapes live like a bit of deja vu of Sunrises/Sunsets past.Evoking a West Coast landscape and breezy windblown dunes, a simple swath of brown become terra firma. A rolling strip of fuchsia peaks over the horizon as the sun dips. The fine orchestration of basic shape transforms a few forms into a greater whole. "Sunrise" slows down Xela's fast-paced gesture into a carefully timed pictorial respite.
Likewise, works like "Chesapeake Bay Bridge," "Grand Canyon," and "Continental Divide" make use of a similar elongation of form. These works mimic the vast depth or horizontal expanse of the subject matter.
Over six feet in length and height, they use monumental scale to represent grandeur. The pieces exhibit Xela's talent for capturing drawn forms on a large scale. Xela magnifies the immediacy and hidden expression that exists in many drawings but disappears in much painting. He resurrects the power of expressionist drawing as a large-scale art form in "Chesapeake Bay Bridge" and "Continental Divide." Both works capture a loose synthesis of gesture and landscape rarely seen in works on their size. Each piece contains the wonderful stream of conscious mark making that happens between an artist and a piece of paper, but is rarely carried over into larger work.
In pared down works like "Malum, Malum, Malum & Malum," Xela uses an elegant economy of means reminiscent of Mu Chi's "Six Persimmons." Both paintings depict round fruit on a blank ground. The works' sparseness highlight repetition, bare spatial representation, and the visual effect of primal form. Xela updates Mu Chi's painterly concern with a wholly modern space. He replaces austerity of "Six Persimmons" with the optical impact of hard-edged modernism. The painting exhibits an appreciation of flat modern form as a vehicle for both painterly and popular expression.
Overly touching on his modernist underpinnings, Xela pays tribute to three forefathers of modernist painting: Klimt, Beckmann and Schiele in "Genius X 3." He makes a confident brushy tribute to these artists. All artists are incarnated in their trademarked style. There is Klimt wearing a colorfully patterned robe. Beckmann appears staunchly in a tuxedo holding a cigarette and Schiele in a contorted gaze; both Beckmann and Schiele's poses are reference of the artists' respective self-portraits. The work is an ironic tribute to the painters whose stylistic liberties provocatively transformed others.
"1942 Wannsee/Wahnsee/Blutsee" is a political departure for Xela. Here, he applies a unique visual vocabulary to subject matter that is typically out of character for Xela.
The title is a play on German words referring to the Berlin suburb by that name, the sheer insanity of the second word and a reference to the sea of blood that emanated from this building.
Xela depicts the Wannsee resort mansion where the Holocaust killing machine was designed in detail. He shows the scenic mansion in its bucolic setting on the lake in harsh black and white against a blood soaked sea and spilling over into the driveway. The portrayal of Wannsee presents the especially disturbing psychology of brutalism married with leisure. The painting's photographic nature adds a poignant political directness to the image and dimension to Xela's oeuvre.
In "Ideas Percolating," Xela returns to art for art's sake. Using a quintessential Jackson Pollock drip, he replaces the existential with the colorful and the meta-narrative with the humorous anecdote. Executed in a format similar to Pollock's "Autumn Rhythm," it is a playful take on the "artist as tortured genius," and the mythology of the abstract expressionist movement.
"Ideas Percolating" introduces color to a language of nihilism. He replaces strenuous de facto standards of abstraction with a sense of rejuvenation. The farcical and naturally absurd is contextualized with shots of bright primary hue.
In this way, much of Xela's art is a generous and provocative creation. He indiscriminately reframes objects with a fanciful optimism and flies in the face of precedent.
One may find anything in looking at his work, except perhaps a sense of pessimism. More common is a lively and colorful rapport with even the most banal of subjects.
The work is all-inclusive and overwhelmingly cheerful. Even dreary subjects appear welcoming.
Confident gesture, a crisp sense of color and keen observation transform the quotidian into refined works of art.
Van Stokes writes on art and visual literacy for publications including Artis Spectrum, Good Use and Spinnings. He has taught Visual Thinking and Foundation Design at Mercy College in White Plains, NY. Since leaving Yale with an MFA, he has contributed art and writing to numerous shows in New York City.