A Lively Intellect That Bucks the System
Los Angeles Times
Jul 23, 2004. pg. E.27
by David Pagel
Grand Mystery on a Small Scale
The alcove between the entrances to the men's and women's locker rooms at the downtown YMCA is among the least glamorous places to see art in Los Angeles. But for the last three years, YMCA members Caroline Clerc and Erik Knutzen have been bringing a wide range of first-rate exhibitions to what they call a "micro-gallery."
Four blocks straight south of the REDCAT Gallery at Disney Hall, SPACE at the YMCA is almost always worth a visit. It has the best hours of any gallery in town (5:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. weekdays, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sundays). It's free. (Nonmembers just have to sign in at the front desk.) And right now its single white wall features three terrific paintings by Dan Connally.
Connally's rock-solid paintings would hold up in places far less hospitable than this. They're not shrinking violets. The smell of chlorine doesn't diminish their effect, which is considerable.
Each measures 20 to 32 inches on a side. Into such compact dimensions, Connally packs so much atmospheric ambiguity that it's easy to get lost -- to forget what you were looking for because the process of looking became so interesting on its own.
The perceptual pleasures that these quasi-figurative abstractions deliver include more than their fair share of conundrums, which are sometimes frustrating, often maddening, occasionally hilarious and always baffling. His doubt-riddled pictures of perfectly ordinary shapes -- neither landscapes nor still lifes -- make you feel stupid, like a tongue-tied numskull too dumb to decipher what's right in front of your eyes.
On the other hand, they make language seem too crude a tool to convey life's mystery. Like Samuel Beckett, Connally walks a fine line between tragedy and comedy. Coloring the experience of both with the shadow of its opposite, his oddly generous works slow you down to a snail's pace. They recall paintings by Howard Hodgkin, Roy Dowell and Michael Reafsnyder but are ultimately too stubborn to do anything but stand on their own.
Copyright Gallery Paule Anglim
14 Geary Street | San Francisco, CA 94108 | 415.433.2710
