Crossbreeds — collage and paint mix it up

“Movement,” 2007, by Lamar Peterson

Artists combine genres in a trio of April shows

By Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

Like a crazy quilt’s patchwork of hand-me-downs, showy stitches and ad hoc structure, collage is open to everything. It also recycles the cast-offs of our existence — ticket stubs, faded labels and wrinkled transfers — to reassemble individuality within society’s anonymity. In three current shows, the artists take the medium a step further and add paint.

Traditionally, collages have been modest in scale as in “An Epic Work: The Pictures and Processes of Robert Seydel’s The Book of Saul” at Cue Art Foundation. In some ways, Seydel approaches collage as if it were writing. Poet and curator Peter Gizzi notes that Seydel works in a notebook and “many of his tools are a writer’s: whiteout, pencils and pens, erasers, tape, type, and newsprint.”

Assembled in rows as many as four deep, Seydel’s work is indeed, epic. It proffers a narrative at every turn and hits on many unifying themes, all while crystallizing chunks of chaos. Built out of weathered, beaten and rescued items, forms boldly and insistently emerge. Among the free-for-all, there are letter/poems typed on old, cheap, dingy buff paper. Elevating such base material strips the work of any pretension. One passage embedded in quirky text sheds light on Seyder's vision: “I climb memory of image and make the possible; all one moment.”

In “Rare Leap” a tattered shred of hairy-looking cardboard becomes a bunny suspended on black ink betwixt a cliff and meteor. On an old postcard, the artist paints an oblong dog with glowing eyes, signifying his belief that the “face, the animal, fantastic or otherwise, is central.”

In a busy series, Seydel makes marks over the collages, obscuring sections with brush and pen. In the most dramatic of these, “old fig,” a Basquiat-type king peers out through a gale of indecipherable inscriptions, scribbles and smears. In these works the act of collage and painting are balanced.

Known for painting satiric idylls, Lamar Peterson has added collage to his powerful neo-expressionistic works. With Katrina as a symbolic backdrop of horror, Peterson fuses a lyric rhythm with a jagged eye. In “Movement,” bits of confetti-like flotsam are glued around a woman chest deep in water, horrified at the detritus she attracts. In another work, purple corpses are stuck in trees. From the top right, a deluge of chartreuse washes over, delivering more mortal coils.

Peterson has stuck scraps of paper all over a blue face in a gestural whirlwind called “Scrambled.” In “Cop,” another portrait, vacant yellow box eyes quote the static masks of Ed Paschke. To completely assimilate the collage aspect, Peterson paints black over a loose background grid of paper rectangles, sublimating the texture while highlighting it.

Painting is the departure point for Gary Bandy. He photographs his own abstract passages, tweaks them digitally and then glues cut-out sections onto paintings, blurring the edges in seamless, seething cauldrons. The resulting tension between real and “realized” is the engine that drives this roiling work.

“Out of the Past” was my favorite. It had a unified palette dominated by complementary yellows and grays. Floral and femur shapes floated over rough stripes which were themselves punctuated by delicate pools and chance splotches. Bandy shows us just how far the marriage of collage and paint can go.