Sub-Rural, # 59, Messineo & Khoury at The Green Gallery

In “Turned,” two artists packed The Green Gallery with optical and technologically interactive bodies of work prompting critical spaces between sculpture, painting and craft. The gallery’s complex trapezoidal floor-plan rejects the ordinary architecture of traditional spaces as much as the individual works of painter RJ Messineo and mixed media artist Sahar Khoury scrub conventional art menus. The plan of the show responds to industrial and architectural motifs and to a degree early modern immersive theater and Constructivist set design.

Messineo’s large canvases articulate the volume and contours of subtly constructivist spaces, while Khoury appoints and interacts in available sites with strikingly contained nautical furniture along with an assortment of reflective ceramic talismans. Her painted metal armatures merge most effectively with Messineo’s gesturally reserved chromatics and all advance across the dominant wall, absorbing viewers who, like the work, occupy a virtual stage.

Khoury’s “Untitled Backstroke 1” is a six-foot glazed porcelain mechanism that mimics features of a human spine and rotates just enough to keep one’s curiosity and meditation persistent. It’s one of two quasi-figurative pieces constructed during an Arts/Industry residency at the Kohler Art Center.

“Backstroke’s” abstraction is simultaneously aesthetic and utilitarian. An adjacent porcelain design of slightly more ambiguous skeletal posture balances small craft propeller blades with robotic humor. Her punning sign fragments carry over to much smaller vernacular details in the “Untitled, Lebanese Pie Chart for etel adnan,” a cast brass and stoneware charm piece and the ironic “Untitled (Decomposed Carrot Charm on Purple Vessel),” a hand-formed clay improvisation on a crumbling tea party trophy. Both ends of her conceptual spectrum affirm a curious order of Dada carnival.

Messinea’s canvasses and panels are interpretative abstraction with an allusion to the Spanish modern master Antonio Tapies and a subtle calculation of Arte Povera’s cold materialism and anti-narratives. Voluminous grayed passages as in “Untitled (note)” emphasize mute trail-tracks and canvas placement. Edges reckon with unoccupied wall space and relationships between formal gains and losses.

Installation View with Untitled (Backstroke 1 & 2″)

The finest moment in “Turned” is the north east corner of the main space, a configuration of diligently gestured paintings, two of which are not only tucked into the corner but “saloned”  floor to ceiling. The works are each diagrammatic and writerly. Scrambled fonts make the most of 3 colors and medium-sized paint rollers where they inscribe full tilt stealth insignia.

“Sunset,” a 96 by 66 in. painting constructed of canvas and wood scrapes cadmium light from a stack of implied panel horizons. The paintings flatness and scale usurp the imposing white elevation. Though installation art provides a way for the body to enter real and implicit dimensions, these works do the same with an impactful plane of color and brushwork that stare vistas literally into the corner the picture.

A ceremony of forms runs quietly in the relationships between manual labor and atelier habits, not just under the influence of the hand-made, but in the superimposition of other disciplines where materials and functional objects coalesce and flux. These include domains of architecture, mechanical engineering, design, and vernacular art. The nature of “Turned” is the artist/worker studio, where subject and theory, set pretty righteous, dialectic site-lines.