by Allan Appel | January 12, 2009 1:14 PM | Permalink

In artistic composition how many times do you repeat a phrase or pattern before it becomes boring?

The newest show at the Haskins Laboratories Gallery, Intricacies: Extreme Detail in Current Art , seems to suggest the eye may be far more giving than the ear.

The exhibition of works by Rachel Hellerich (pictured) and six other area artists who luxuriate in repetition of patterns is on view until Jan. 23. Even if you are not one to count and step over cracks on the sidewalk on your way to 300 George St., it’s well worth a visit.

Hellerich’s lushly painted acrylics on paper suggest influences such as Hindu or Islamic art, or even the Rococo, where all empty space is deemed the enemy to be conquered with pattern.

In these two compositions, called “Orange Crush” and “Fade to Jade” as well as in two larger canvasses called “Phantastic Edifices,” she has an eighth of the composition, at the top, uncovered. It appears, in the latter works, to be a sky but one that is quite literally green, as if with envy for the temple and built environment below.

Taking the edge off Hellerich’s repeating patterns is the inclusion of a figure, the only human figure in the entire exhibition. I’m not sure what this connotes: perhaps that human variousness, palpable to the eye, is the net result of all the invisible patterning that creates the cells, and from there the creatures and forms of nature, including ours truly. Hellerich’s figure is, by turns mysterious and humorous, is part Vashti, part ET, part Casper the Friendly Ghost.

It’s by no means accidental that art using extreme detail and patterning is featured at Haskins Laboratories, a scientific venue. Most of the works in the show suggest views cosmic or microscopic. West Haven artist John Arabolis, for example, displays a series called “Fabric of Life,”

It just might connote that essential fabric of life, the brain’s interior, with its elegant ganglia reaching out across a cerulean blue background.

Charles Prinz Kopelson’s oil and ink on linen compositions, such as his “The Americas II”, are like an aerial view of some ancient city, all neatly laid out and viewed from a helicopter height. If you step back, however, you might be faced with no aerial view at all but a close-up of glyphs and pictographs.

Which is it? What comes to mind, the more one moves up and down the line-up of works, which pleasantly fills several corridors on the ninth floor of 300 George, is that nature’s two halves, the vast world of the cosmos and the immensities within each tiny biological unit, might not be so different after all. At least not to artists.

Edith Borax-Morrison’s pen and ink drawings are nearly all circles that contain a pandemonium of white canals that become tendrils reaching out from a central octopus-like knot or ball of organic stuff in the middle. The circle containing all this action gives the works, which have charming names such as Minerva’s Revenge, Split Decision, and Gossamer Drift, a pleasant tension.

The only artist who actually lets nature be on hand to be her actual helper is Alyse Rosner. She lays down acrylic patterns of dots or swirls over small squares of raw pine. Then she lets the wood’s natural striations be visible both through the color she adds as well as, untouched, on the sides of the blocks.

One artist is somehow not fully at ease with the notion that nature rules with her patterning and our artists’ role is merely perhaps to capture or approximate. That artist is Hamden’s Cham Hendon. His three compositions are done in acrylic so thick it seems like enamel: one sea battle, one mountain scene, and this one called “Woodland Friends” suggests that nature has ordered her creations less according to patterns of shape than of color. Or the painting is an homage to the fast receding vistas of LSD, Jefferson Airplane, Grace Slick, and their ten-foot-tall white rabbit. Either way, the work is eerie and oddly humbling.

Intricacies: Extreme Detail in Current Art is organized by the Arts Council of Greater New Haven and curated by Debbie Hesse.

