January Issue 2002
UNC-Charlotte in Charlotte, NC, Features Works by Arnold Mesches
by Grace Glueck
An exhibition of paintings by New York artist Arnold Mesches, entitled, Echoes: A Century Survey, will be on view in the Rowe Arts Main Gallery in the Rowe Arts Building on the Campus of the UNC-Charlotte from Jan. 14 through Feb. 8, 2002. This will be the artist's 98th solo exhibition and is a part of a multi-city tour that includes New York, Los Angles, Chicago, Portland, Richmond, Denver and Hartford.
An impassioned Expressionist painter, Mesches, now 77, has stayed with figuration through all the art world "isms" of his time. His work combines his interest in 20th century conflicts - wars, stricks, the Holocaust, class and economic struggle - with his own family saga: a hapless immigrant father, a Depression-haunted childhood, his mother's life drained by her generation's consignment of women to domesticity.
But all is not gloom and doom; Mesches gets it down with energy, bold colors and a lively humor (if not great painting) that keeps you looking. In this show, originated by the Oregon Jewish Museum and the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, several large works bearing images and symbols of events important in Mesches' life are accompanied by many small, black and white canvasses painted to look like photographs of his family and friends in earlier days.
Coney Island (1999), one of the big paintings, expresses the artist's nostalgia for the playland he frequented as a child. It combines images of Coney Island's baroque entertainment structures, of Mesches as a child in a pony cart, of corsets in a shop window, with a map of the world, and some family snapshots, the whole dominated by a spray of colored arrows shooting in all directions at the top.
But the merriment here is countered by a small image (1977) of the playland as a hellhole, with a grisly clown holding grotesque masks; rockets and an enemy plane in the air; grim men on horseback rushing off in the foreground; and amusement rides like Wonder Wheel seen as sardonic mockeries.
An old fashioned show about feelings in an era of art world ironies, Echoes: A Century Survey nevertheless works. The painting helps: guileless, straight from-the-tube abruptness strikes just the right note.
For more information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings or call the gallery at 704/687-3315.
Grace Glueck The New York Times, Dec 15, 2000
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