Exploring the Hidden Psyche in the Art of Steve Cieslawski
For several years now, CFM Gallery has been affording visitors tantalizing glimpses into the private world of Steve Cieslawski. Here and there, in group shows, the gallery's owner and director, Neil Zukerman, has judiciously included oils by Cieslawski in the company of much better-known artists such as Leonor Fini, Frederick Hart, and Anne Bachelier. Invariably, Cieslawski's smoothly painted, meticulously completed canvases were intriguing, often depicting archaically dressed female figures in enchanted landscapes, amid intricate mazes of hedgerows and trees whittled into fantastic topiary displays, as though by some Edward Scissorhands or a mad gardener. From the very first, these carefully selected works appeared as portents of something major to come, something being nurtured and hoarded under wraps, only to be fully revealed at some undetermined later date.
One memorable painting was called "Garden of Eros," although the male of the species had apparently been banished from it like a muddy-footed intruder from a newly waxed kitchen, leaving only three prim ladies in old-fashioned hoop-skirts, positioned like equidistant pyramids amid strange, towering fruits, giving the impression that Eden had been domesticated with a vengeance to equal that of "The Stepford Wives."
Another early canvas, considerably less serene, depicted cloaked and hooded women clinging to a huge primitive wheel, churning like a water-wheel through a dense layer of gilt-edged clouds. The anxious, histrionic gestures of the figures, as well as the overall turbulence of the composition, recalled Gericault's Romantic masterpiece "The Raft of the Medusa " and hinted at the dramatic evolution now unveiled in Cieslawsld's first major solo show, at CFM Gallery, 112 Greene Street, from September 6 through 29.
This artist has mastered his technique so that his figures now inhabit a fully realized realm, reminiscent of Alfred Kubin's novel "The Other Side," first published in Germany in 1908 which describes a kingdom known as the "Dream Realm," whose overcast skies and odd inhabitants, dressed variously in the styles of many periods, Steve Cieslawski appears to channel visually.
Indeed, we are willing to abandon disbelief outside the garden gate upon entering Cieslawski's rarefied realm because he has steadily evolved into a sublime painter with an ability to evoke atmospheric nuances with stunning verisimilitude.
With a fine-pointed brush dipped in liquid light, Cieslawski layers translucent glazes with the clarity of a Flemish master, as seen in the "Midwinter Navigators." In this 2002 canvas, three skaters- two men and one woman- whirl on their blades around an icy object shaped like a huge halved lemon and balanced miraculously on the surface of an endless ocean. Here, Cieslawski's crystalline rendering of the sky, with its back-lit knot of clouds, as well as the placid surface of the water, recalls the 19th century American transcendentalism of the Luminists.
In another canvas created this year, "The Moon Viewing Pavilion," a man and two women stand under a parasol between tall columns, gazing at a sky in which no less than three crescent moons mirror the curved sails of three small boats dreamily traversing the lake below. While the rigid postures and formal dress of the moon gazers could be likened to the quasi-Victorian graphic farce of Edward Gorey, the slightly comic situation is elevated aesthetically by virtue of Cieslawski's surpass- ing skills as a painter-particularly his melding of delicate pink, yellow, and blue hues to achieve a unique chromatic frisson.
Equally compelling in another way is "Procession," a larger composition in which six human figures and two canines traverse a mountainous landscape in single file under a dramatic canopy of clouds. Led by a pendant-dangling priestess in a long dress decorated with a pattern of stylized eyes, the medieval-looking group, one carrying an incense burner trailing a thick plume of pink smokce, others lugging a vessel from which a large likeness of a human face peers mysteriously through what appears to be a pool of yellow liquid.
Although this is obviously an arcane ritual-perhaps of purification, judging from the pendant wielded so purposefully by the priestess at the head of the procession and the incense trail left by one of her acolytes-it provokes a subliminal sense of recognition in the modern viewer.
All of Steve Cieslawslci's recent paintings, in fact, appear to tap into what Carl Jung referred to as the "collective unconscious": the past experience of the human species persisting in the pool of mass memory as symbolized in archetypes that recur in dreams, myths, and fairy tales. Thus we encounter a host of bizarre, yet oddly fan1iliar images: In "Infantas," two little girls in a forest, bearing armloads of sinuous twigs; a man in a monk's robe and cowl passing a fish through what appears to be a disc of water appearing like an apparition in mid-air, in "Myths and Examples"; a woman in a vaulted gothic chamber with miniature actors performing in an opening in the bodice of her dress in "Theater of Memory"; and two figures in Goya-esque gowns and veils watching as a third woman, reclining nude on an ornate golden sleigh, materializes amid radiant arctic auras on a frozen pond to herald the "Arrival of Spring."
These and other equally fabulous images suggest visual guide -books for those lands which are half known to us. That Steve Cieslawski can guide us through a tour of the hidden psyche so convincingly in our present, much more skeptical, century makes his accomplish- ment all the more remarkable.
Ed McCormick, Gallery & Studio 2002
For several years now, CFM Gallery has been affording visitors tantalizing glimpses into the private world of Steve Cieslawski. Here and there, in group shows, the gallery's owner and director, Neil Zukerman, has judiciously included oils by Cieslawski in the company of much better-known artists such as Leonor Fini, Frederick Hart, and Anne Bachelier. Invariably, Cieslawski's smoothly painted, meticulously completed canvases were intriguing, often depicting archaically dressed female figures in enchanted landscapes, amid intricate mazes of hedgerows and trees whittled into fantastic topiary displays, as though by some Edward Scissorhands or a mad gardener. From the very first, these carefully selected works appeared as portents of something major to come, something being nurtured and hoarded under wraps, only to be fully revealed at some undetermined later date.
One memorable painting was called "Garden of Eros," although the male of the species had apparently been banished from it like a muddy-footed intruder from a newly waxed kitchen, leaving only three prim ladies in old-fashioned hoop-skirts, positioned like equidistant pyramids amid strange, towering fruits, giving the impression that Eden had been domesticated with a vengeance to equal that of "The Stepford Wives."
Another early canvas, considerably less serene, depicted cloaked and hooded women clinging to a huge primitive wheel, churning like a water-wheel through a dense layer of gilt-edged clouds. The anxious, histrionic gestures of the figures, as well as the overall turbulence of the composition, recalled Gericault's Romantic masterpiece "The Raft of the Medusa " and hinted at the dramatic evolution now unveiled in Cieslawsld's first major solo show, at CFM Gallery, 112 Greene Street, from September 6 through 29.
This artist has mastered his technique so that his figures now inhabit a fully realized realm, reminiscent of Alfred Kubin's novel "The Other Side," first published in Germany in 1908 which describes a kingdom known as the "Dream Realm," whose overcast skies and odd inhabitants, dressed variously in the styles of many periods, Steve Cieslawski appears to channel visually.
Indeed, we are willing to abandon disbelief outside the garden gate upon entering Cieslawski's rarefied realm because he has steadily evolved into a sublime painter with an ability to evoke atmospheric nuances with stunning verisimilitude.
With a fine-pointed brush dipped in liquid light, Cieslawski layers translucent glazes with the clarity of a Flemish master, as seen in the "Midwinter Navigators." In this 2002 canvas, three skaters- two men and one woman- whirl on their blades around an icy object shaped like a huge halved lemon and balanced miraculously on the surface of an endless ocean. Here, Cieslawski's crystalline rendering of the sky, with its back-lit knot of clouds, as well as the placid surface of the water, recalls the 19th century American transcendentalism of the Luminists.
In another canvas created this year, "The Moon Viewing Pavilion," a man and two women stand under a parasol between tall columns, gazing at a sky in which no less than three crescent moons mirror the curved sails of three small boats dreamily traversing the lake below. While the rigid postures and formal dress of the moon gazers could be likened to the quasi-Victorian graphic farce of Edward Gorey, the slightly comic situation is elevated aesthetically by virtue of Cieslawski's surpass- ing skills as a painter-particularly his melding of delicate pink, yellow, and blue hues to achieve a unique chromatic frisson.
Equally compelling in another way is "Procession," a larger composition in which six human figures and two canines traverse a mountainous landscape in single file under a dramatic canopy of clouds. Led by a pendant-dangling priestess in a long dress decorated with a pattern of stylized eyes, the medieval-looking group, one carrying an incense burner trailing a thick plume of pink smokce, others lugging a vessel from which a large likeness of a human face peers mysteriously through what appears to be a pool of yellow liquid.
Although this is obviously an arcane ritual-perhaps of purification, judging from the pendant wielded so purposefully by the priestess at the head of the procession and the incense trail left by one of her acolytes-it provokes a subliminal sense of recognition in the modern viewer.
All of Steve Cieslawslci's recent paintings, in fact, appear to tap into what Carl Jung referred to as the "collective unconscious": the past experience of the human species persisting in the pool of mass memory as symbolized in archetypes that recur in dreams, myths, and fairy tales. Thus we encounter a host of bizarre, yet oddly fan1iliar images: In "Infantas," two little girls in a forest, bearing armloads of sinuous twigs; a man in a monk's robe and cowl passing a fish through what appears to be a disc of water appearing like an apparition in mid-air, in "Myths and Examples"; a woman in a vaulted gothic chamber with miniature actors performing in an opening in the bodice of her dress in "Theater of Memory"; and two figures in Goya-esque gowns and veils watching as a third woman, reclining nude on an ornate golden sleigh, materializes amid radiant arctic auras on a frozen pond to herald the "Arrival of Spring."
These and other equally fabulous images suggest visual guide -books for those lands which are half known to us. That Steve Cieslawski can guide us through a tour of the hidden psyche so convincingly in our present, much more skeptical, century makes his accomplish- ment all the more remarkable.
Ed McCormick, Gallery & Studio 2002