Land(e)scapes
at ZOLLA/LIEBERMAN GALLERY
"Filtered and Bound"
Robin Dluzen, Artist & Art Critic
“It takes a while to figure it out,” Rhonda Gates told me, referring to her process-laden, multi-layered nature paintings. Gates favors abstraction over illustration, formalism over realism, method over romance, and each piece in “land(e)scapes” bears the evidence of the artist's problem-solving strategies: underpaintings blooming beneath opaque patterns and forms, and shimmering graphite linework suspended between. The construction of Gates’ paintings is the culmination of an array of tools and processes, material and conceptual, all serving to encapsulate the way that our encounters with nature shift and change as we attempt to understand and recollect what it was that we experienced.
Gates’ paintings in “land(e)scapes” hinge upon the particular scenario of nature being a respite, an escape, an anticipated excursion — in short, a place that is decidedly not the here of our everyday urbanity or suburbia but a there to be visited and from which to return home. In this context, what one has encountered exists thereafter in one's awareness in a modified form, filtered and bounded. In works like Road Cut: Almost There and Road Cut: On the Way, great vistas have been cropped into modest squares; autocumulus clouds are rendered as uniform grids, the strata of the cliffs even and orderly, the effect flattening like an overexposed photo. Gates’ treatment of the landscape underscores the truth that, while the painted terrain retains its essence, something always changes in the capturing of it. No matter how well-told the story, how dutifully rendered the painting, how meticulously edited the Instagram post, the process of transcription has its limits.
And it's not just our conscious attempts at reproduction that are subject to these limitations. Even within our own memories, recalled and unexpressed, our encounters are made simpler, smaller, as our brains alternately focus and delete according to their biologically determined bias. So much of Gates’ practice deals with the push and pull of impression and intellect, and the paintings in “land(e)scapes” evidence such a grappling. In pieces like Reflected Cloud, the fine line of the horizon separates the waterscape. The symmetry of the ovoid “cloud,” above and below, and the orderliness of the parallel lines of the water's ripples, overlay the gestures of the underpainting, as if applying logic to sensation.
Summer Prairie: Queen Anne's Lace too embodies these complications. Those who are familiar with the flowering wild carrot know of their umbels of so many tiny white flowers that give the appearance of gauzy, floating clouds from a distance. In the painting, Gates renders the umbels with her relentless symmetry: tiny circles grouped into radial disks, hovering among stylized blades of grass. Here, impression and intellect collide, with what things seem like and what we know them to be coalescing in abstraction.
2024