Taiwanese American artist Leigh Wen subdivides nature’s fecundity into tidy groupings, often foursomes. “At One With the Elements,” the title of her show at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, refers to the world’s essential ingredients as defined by classical European thought: earth, air, water and fire. (Asian traditions often add a fifth, generally translated as “void.”)
Wen’s quartets include paintings that are basically a single color, raked by thin lines inscribed in the pigment with a stylus. The stringy scrapes add a hint of violence to the New York-based artist’s unfailingly pretty pictures.
If not always literal, Wen’s paintings are representational. Rippling carved lines transform green expanses into mountains and valleys, and blue fields into seascapes or waterfalls. More realistic are her renderings of flowers, each painted on large linen canvases shaped to the outline of the individual bloom. These use the same scratched-pigment technique as the other pictures but are multihued and more detailed. The flower paintings, some placed high on the wall, dominate the high-ceilinged space at the center of the exhibition.
The artist, who grew up in a rural area, sometimes ventures beyond the picture frame to convey nature’s enveloping presence. She makes porcelain tubes on which blue oceanic currents flow around stone-colored actual outcroppings, and surrounds a round painting of birds against a dark, starry sky with cutout 3D birds. Also on display is a set of gowns in blue, red, green and purple — water, fire, earth and air.
Yet Wen’s principal devices are those inscribed lines — “the hidden pulse” of Wen’s work, according to curator Sarah Tanguy’s catalogue essay — and pictorial series that balance repetition and variation. “Ginger Lilies” is a 12-part painting of white blossoms, with highlights in gray and yellow, against a mottled blue backdrop that could be sea or sky. The flowers appear to fall and get denser as they cascade across the tightly gridded rectangular canvases from top left to bottom right. The overall composition is Wen’s universe in microcosm: dynamic and ever-changing, yet fundamentally orderly.
Leigh Wen: At One With the Elements Through Aug. 13 at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW. american.edu/cas/museum. 202-885-1000.
Elizabeth Martineau
Intricate in both pattern and texture, Elizabeth Martineau’s collage-paintings conjure her native Haiti and its African heritage. Faces, flowers and textile-like designs characterize her artworks, which fill every centimeter of the canvas or paper on which they’re painted. “Un Moment de Silence dans le Bruit des Coleurs,” the title of the D.C. artist’s African Art Beats show, means “a moment of silence in the noise of colors.” Visually, however, Martineau’s style is more often boisterous than hushed.
The show includes a few soft sculptures, notably a towering totem of fringed fabric titled in homage to Sam Gilliam, the Washington artist known for stained, draped canvases. But most of the pieces are pictures whose multiple layers of metallic pigments and collaged paper contrast the images rendered in a flat, perspective-free style. Women whose oval faces sometimes resemble masks emerge from lush vegetation, geometric patterns or — in the case of “Black Lives Matter” — scrawled text. A few titles invoke Matisse, the French modernist whose style was shaped by traditional African art.
Amid the more crowded compositions are several pictures that depict a single woman whose brown skin glows, and whose elongated necks and limbs are so elastic they seem almost liquid. As in her other works, foreground and background nearly merge, but in these the synergy is achieved more with color than design. World and figure fuse into one shining golden whole.
Elizabeth Martineau: Un Moment de Silence dans le Bruit des Coleurs Through Sept. 15 at African Art Beats, 3501 Lowell St. NW. africanartbeats.com. 202-766-2608.
Anselm Reyle
The found objects contained within Anselm Reyle’s assemblages might be neon signs, evocative of urban entertainment zones, or bales of hay, redolent of the countryside. But all the elements in the Berlin artist’s Von Ammon Co. show, “Xeno Dust,” come to the same end: They get encased in tinted acrylic boxes that suggest see-through coffins. As the gallery’s statement notes, Reyle’s brightly colored but entombed artworks invite thoughts of “the funereal and sepulchral.”
“Xeno” is from the Greek word for “stranger,” hinting at an alien quality to Reyle’s creations. Yet they’re made of everyday stuff, mostly shiny and manufactured. (The hay is a partial exception, but it’s coated in silver enamel to give it an industrial character.) Although the neon pieces include recognizable words and images, much of Reyle’s work can be seen as riffs on abstract painting. When fixed inside plastic boxes, rumpled sheets of reflective Mylar bunting come to resemble color-field canvases, with creases standing in for brushstrokes.
Also akin to abstract painting are five computer-generated photographs in which neon-bright colors — and in one picture, part of a word — swirl and splinter. Like his 3D artworks, Reyle’s photos are kinetic yet frozen, vibrant yet embalmed.
Anselm Reyle: Xeno Dust Through Aug. 13 at Von Ammon Co., 3330 Cady’s Alley NW. vonammon.co. 202-893-9797.
Zachary Fabri
“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”
Those words are written on a shroud that Brooklyn artist Zachary Fabri wore while moving ritually through central Philadelphia. The garment and photographs of the shroud-wearing Fabri in blurred motion are on display at the Nicholson Project, a cultural center in Southeast D.C. where Fabri will perform Aug. 5. The pieces in the show, which include a nine-minute video, respond to what the gallery’s statement calls “the successive murders of Black people by police officers in public space.”
The mostly black-and-white video, commissioned by the Philadelphia-based Barnes Foundation, follows a dripping Fabri through that city’s downtown during a rainstorm. He dances and poses, his actions accented by the pinging tones of his own score. The musical component seems apt, since the performer plays the city as if it’s an instrument. Rather than commemorate specific events, Fabri claims the streets and sidewalks as his own. He’s surveying a possible tomorrow in which all people are free to move through the American cityscape.
Zachary Fabri: Mourning Stutter Through Aug. 12 at the Nicholson Project, 2310 Nicholson St. SE. thenicholsonproject.org.
