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September Issue 2003
Jackson Gallery in Aiken, SC, Offers Works by Marcelo Novo
As its opener for the 2003-2004 season and Aiken's new, monthly "Art After Hours" gallery and studio walk, the Jackson Gallery in Aiken, SC, presents the exhibition, Marcelo Novo: A Decade. The exhibition which will be on view from Sept. 18 through Oct. 11, 2003, will feature works by Argentine native and Columbia, SC, resident Marcelo Novo, one of the state's most prominent painters. More precisely, the gallery will show a large selection of the forty-year-old Novo's recent, highly acclaimed ten-year retrospective, featured this summer at the Sumter Gallery of Art in Sumter, SC.
The exhibit begins as part of Aiken's "Art After Hours", which will take place every third Thursday of the month during the Fall of 2003 and Spring of 2004. Three downtown galleries and several artists'studios will be open, and downtown restaurants will have extended hours. Among the other "Art After Hours" openings on Sept. 18 is a James Boden exhibition at the brand new Rabold Gallery.
Novo's Sumter retrospective, Diez Anos/Ten Years, 1992-2002, received extensive media praise. The show drew large crowds from the Sumter and Columbia area and beyond. "Marcelo Novo's work strikes a chord with viewers in South Carolina, and it has done so on a fairly consistent basis since his first one-person show in this country in 1993," the Columbia weekly Free Times commented in a review. "Novo's blend of cultural influences brings a little bit of tango to South Carolina," The artist sold a dozen of his large and small paintings, lithographs, linoleum prints and etchings.
The daily Sumter Item wrote that Novo's paintings reveal "an emotional response to design and light and shade. Like the highly stylized works of Thomas Hart Benton, Diego Rivera and Georgia O'Keeffe, Novo's pieces create an almost surreal representation of familiar objects." In 2000, The State newspaper wrote that Novo has "got something going that works a deft touch for the amusing and absurd." His show that year at Columbia's City Art, the city's premier art gallery, took that venue's "space to a new level," the newspaper wrote.
For this Novo exhibition, the Jackson Gallery will show more than forty works from the artist's retrospective. "We are truly delighted that Marcelo is giving us a chance to show his work to art lovers in the Aiken and Augusta area," says gallery owner Jackson. "Although Marcelo has been one of the state's most successful artists in the past decade, he has not had a show in our area. That's a shame, because he is a major talent who has been in gallery and museum shows up and down the East Coast, from New York City to Washington, DC, from Charlotte to Florida. And, of course, in his home country, Argentina."
"Marcelo's work is unique, particularly within an American and especially a Southern context," Jackson says. "His work is colorful, both literally and figuratively. He often uses bold, popping colors, but even when he restricts his palette to shades of gray and brown, his work is vibrant and alive. That's one of the reasons why it's so accessible on so many levels to such a wide range of people. The strong figurative and narrative nature of Marcelo's work also helps in this respect, of course."
Novo's figures are usually simplified and stylized in a style that is Novo's own. Regulars in his paintings include himself through self portraits that are usually more conceptual than literal. There are musicians, female nudes, children, and laughing men whose laugh could just as well be a painful grin. There are circus acts, dancers, boxers, lovers, angels and sumo wrestlers. All these folks share space with an assortment of animals, especially birds, elephants, rhinos, and horses, some of them with wings.
Together, these creatures figure in unexpected, at times somewhat warped scenes that are often humorous, whimsical or simply surrealist. They fit the magic-realist tradition in Latin American art. There is a man dancing with a skeleton, another man whose headgear is his pet, and a naked woman lying on top of a rhinoceros.
"I am not interested in communicating a precise message," Novo says. "I like for people to look at the work and find their own reflections." And they do. "People are fascinated by different cultures," Free Times commented, "and Novo wears his difference like a fine suit. But while the exotic might provide an initial attraction, it's Novo's imagery that retains the viewer's attention."
"Marcelo's scenes are often full of surprises," gallery owner Jackson says. "There's a rhinoceros casting not his own but two human shadows, and the human-like angel who is kept airborne over an urban landscape by two thick ropes leading to nowhere. And you have to wonder whether the guy sleeping with his head on a table is really sleeping while a woman's leg, stocking and all, is teasing him. Also, who would expect a guy from Buenos Aires to paint two big-old sumo wrestlers?"
Novo paints spontaneously and fast. He uses a technique called "automatism" that was developed by Surrealist artists in the first half of the 20th century. "Automatism," Novo says, "is recording images that flow from the subconscious, a method of creation that gives the artist unlimited creative freedom. When I start I never know what will manifest itself. I start by doodling with a pen or brush. When I feel as though things are happening, I follow."
The trick is, Novo says, to transfer onto canvas what's in his mind.
In addition to the Novo exhibition, the Jackson Gallery will show in its sculpture garden a grouping of horse sculptures by gallery owner and artist Bill Jackson. The welded steel horses are in different sizes, including life-size. One of them was exhibited in the lobby of the Columbia Museum of Art earlier this year.
The Novo show is the first in a strong 2003-04 line-up at the Jackson Gallery. In Oct. 2003, the gallery presents paintings and sculptures by Stephen Chesley. A Nov.-Jan., 2004 group exhibition will show figurative paintings and sculptures by artists from the United States, Mexico, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands. They include South Carolina's Tonya Gregg, Jeff Donovan, Michael Hale and Eric Miller.
In Jan. 2004, the gallery will organize a homecoming for Aiken's own Hollis Brown Thornton, whose work was part of a major group show at the Columbia Museum of Art this summer. The Jackson Gallery exhibition will be Thornton's first solo show in South Carolina since he moved to Chicago a few years ago. In the spring, the gallery will mount shows by South Carolina painter Matt Overend and gallery owner Jackson.
For further information check our SC Commercial Gallery listing, call the gallery at 803/648-7397, e-mail at (jacksongallery@mindspring.com) or at (www.artnet.com).
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