Art Review of T.L Solien’s new exhibition Vessels on Vessels / The Specious Landscape. Article written by Shane McAdam’s and published by Shepherd Express
T.L. Solien at Tory Folliard
Solien has been painting for the better part of six decades, and since a lot of his life has been spent painting much of his work by nature is about painting.
Whenever I have to answer the sticky question of what a work of art “means,” I usually say something about how it’s a reflection of the reality of its maker. I’ll follow that up by asking if the individuals in their own lives can be described as having “meaning.” They usually agree that people just are, and that isness is enough to carry on enjoying various the humans in their lives indefinitely. Works of art are indeed always stand-ins for their makers to some degree: vessels full of incalculable possibilities that don’t require objective meanings to be meaningful. T.L. Solien’s current exhibition “Vessels on Vessels: the Specious Landscape” at Tory Folliard through February 1, reminds us of this from the outset.
But the exhibition goes further, employing that eponymous metaphorical vessel as an ongoing chance to unpack countless other nested vessels within. Solien has been painting for the better part of six decades, and since a lot of his life has been spent painting much of his work by nature is about painting. The content in his work is thus part of a rich, self-reflexive churn of symbols, strategies, and self-mythologies that can be appreciated on many levels. For instance, the large acrylic, oil, and flashe painting AZRAEL presents a yellow, cartoonish, winged cat in the upper center of the painting above a teetering tower of other vibrantly colored objects. Those familiar with Solien’s paintings might connect the cat as a stand-in for himself. It turns out, Solien, a dog-person, sees the cat as a reflection of his deficiencies. While the rest of us might do such self-deprecated labelling in language, maybe uttering “I don’t like that side of myself,” Solien stows his loose baggage in painterly symbols for us to pick through at will.
Dare the Viewer
But the winged cat is also a reference to a scheming feline accomplice from an ‘80s cartoon, to Greek mythology, to nature, and also happens to work as a vehicle to propel the more overt narrative at its surface. The painting works on its own without a psycho-biographical key, with all its punched-up color, formal balance and figure-ground theatricality. It dares the viewer to read it in a way they would only look at a Morandi, Brancusi or Diebenkorn. And in doing so, the viewer gets a sense of the psycho-biographical tumult even if the coded history eludes them.
He also stuffs this and other paintings with more literal vessels like vases, cottages, and chests-of-drawers, all offering further insight into an implied psychological narrative. Some works are more pared down, while others more formally composed, and still some others read almost as Rorschachs of his life, such as paintings of a riverboat and one of two red squirrels beneath a decorative stand topped with one-eyed lozenge. Still, all the work in “Vessels” conspires to build a single complex sense of personal searching as it relates to image making. A small painting of a green folding room divider in front of a blue rug feels more independent and ominous than many of the others. If AZRAEL is a dragnet full of nagging thoughts and circling anxieties, A Map to the Stairs seems to have hooked a singular moment. We don’t know exactly what the moment is, but the stark, de Chirico-like space and the Don Bluth-ey quality of it evokes a brooding nostalgia that sends us searching for a place we remember…even as we admire its pictorial composure with a separate mind.
The rest of Solien’s show title refers to landscapes that are deceptive in some way. And this might be the best hint at how the vessels function in his exhibition. Art, but painting specifically, is a mongrel operation. A painting is never one thing, and its many things are usually impossibly contradictory. This is because the painters who paint them don’t resolve into simple conclusions any more than your friends, colleagues, or own self-conception does. When people make sense, painting will make sense. But as long as they don’t–and don’t hold your breath–we’ll need artists to explode meaning into a bunch of naughty, unstable, and mismatched containers of the sort that T.L. Solien has laid out for us at Tory Folliard.