Colors and shapes in the abstract tend to elicit little from the average person beyond, "Oh, that's pretty." But Buffalo, NY artist Monica Angle's exhibit, Loose Leafs, featured at the Bayly Art Museum through July 17, presents abstraction with a rare lucidity.
Originally out of Minneapolis, Angle's work in Loose Leafs is based on aggregations of rectangular monotypes -- the Leafs -- generated by painting small sheets of soft mulberry paper with watercolor inks. Though Angle has used such sheets individually as a form of personal record keeping, their position in relation to one another lends each piece its clarity -- the sum in Angle's art is greater than its parts.
In one of the more obvious pieces, a four-part series entitled "Off the Grid," the pattern of painted rectangles nearly perfectly emulates a cityscape shot from above. The subtle differences in texture and lightness evoke the early morning, the early evening and daylight in between.
Each city varies. Observing the pieces is like a guessing game, with each work coaxing the viewer into an attempt to discover which metropolitan area is being surveyed. The greenery of far Northwest Washington, D.C. comes to mind at times, as does the dark blue of the Charles River contrasted by the grey concrete of Boston or Cambridge. But whatever the urban subject, the works effectively elicit the individual viewer's experience.
The standalone piece "Collected Move" offers a different perspective, while bearing just as much clarity mixed in with the obscure. Two cold, blue eyes stare piercingly out at the viewer. Diverging from her horizontal and vertical motifs, Angle uses angled, thin brush strokes to represent dirty blonde hair falling over the rouge face in which the eyes are set. The piece invokes Picasso's cubist works, but only on a superficial level.
The vivid colors on this abstract face are far more central than the rectangular geometry that characterizes Loose Leafs. The emotion of the face -- viewed at an extreme close-up -- presents a puzzle waiting to be solved through each viewer's interpretation.
However, another series, "Sensible Horizons," ultimately fails where the other works succeed. The pieces in the sequence offer an abstraction of a horizon with sun. Whereas a real horizon is constituted merely by a mixture of colors, the visuals here lack the depth and personality that a cityscape or a human face can offer. In this way, "Sensible Horizons" is an exception to the exhibit's clarity. The series leaves the viewer bored and elicits an, "Oh, that's pretty," reaction without provoking much thought or offering meaningful insights.
Yet, Angle's subtle exhibit is certainly worth the time, especially during the leisurely summer. It's entirely possible to spend a few hours teasing out the nuances of each piece without being bogged down with lofty artistic pretension.
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