Pointillism: Two-Day Show at a One-Room GalleryCarolyn MooreOne canvas sinks in dead air. It captures containment: one picture within another. A photo sits on the trace of a table, sole survivors of a bare, vague room. The photo arrests marriage. Two heads affect the smug swap of forty for thirty. Their caged attention obeys the lens, not the brush. Yet something saves this pair from looking foolish as lovers mugging through funhouse cutouts. Like a boiled egg in its porcelain cup, the husbandıs face tops a cone of tie and shirt. What rescues his span of encroaching forehead? And the wife, stolid yet drained as coffee grounds? What salvages such limp blondeness? What else but those pointillist measles creeping past the photoıs hinted frame to infect the actual one. Canvas sweats hard, annuls our faith in borders. We are asked to believe disease is the cure for this pair posing in artful restraint. Spots blur all that divides one from the other, and both from the doubtful table and room. For eight hundred dollars we could breakfast beneath this, on a real table we cover with dimity. If we stare hard enough we could levitate its spots. We could slice some speckled fruit the artist surely forgot. We wouldnıt have to talk. We could join the dots. Carolyn Moore |