Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum

Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum

Milwaukee, WI

414-271-3986

http://www.villaterracemuseum.org/

Virtues, Vices, Vanities: Paintings by Jean Roberts Guequierre

November 18, 2001 through January 6, 2002

Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum presents Virtues, Vices, Vanities: Paintings by Jean Roberts Guequierre, November 18, 2001 through January 6, 2002, with a public reception Sunday, November 18 from 1 to 4 p.m. Evoking pre-Renaissance European art, the exhibition is a visual feast of Medieval-style figures populating jewel-toned oils while presenting moral issues such as temperance, prudence, faith, fortitude, and justice.

The public is invited to the Remarks and Gallery Talk, a brief lecture by Nathan Guequierre followed by a gallery tour with the artist, on Wednesday, November 28 at 7 p.m. Nathan Guequierre, the artist's husband and an internationally published author, is art critic for the Shepherd Express and contributor to the New Art Examiner. The gallery will be open at 6:30 p.m.

Organized by James DeYoung, head conservator at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Virtues, Vices, Vanities features two dozen oil paintings from several series of work: "Seven Deadly Sins," "Seven Cardinal Virtues," "Games," "Nature Girls," and "Things I Mistook for Love." Often humorous, Guequierre's paintings present people embodying universal roles, the metaphors used to understand life. "There is a brief moment in each child's life where stories heard meld with the observed adult world. For that brief moment, there is a balance between innocence and wisdom," said guest curator James DeYoung, "The paintings of Jean Roberts Guequierre, with their child-like clarity, capture that balance."

Inspired by the Flemish Primitives, Giotto, and illuminations from the medieval Book of Hours, Jean Roberts Guequierre explores games, sins and virtues. "In some ways, I am trying to recapture technical and compositional elements of this art-gestures, flatness, translucency, mutable settings, a narrative voice simultaneously intimate and removed" said Guequierre, "My narratives tend to be more ambiguous, however, than those of old paintings, largely because I don't work with a codified system of symbols."

Guequierre uses painting techniques similar to old masters Van Eyck and VanderWeyden, building multiple layers of translucent oil washes on canvas and board primed with colored grounds. Light pores through the glazes and is reflected off the primer, creating luminous images. The engaged figures -- often borrowed directly or tacitly from earlier paintings -- enact narratives unbounded by neither time nor place. A display devoted to her oil painting process shows artworks in various stages, from preliminary sketches to under painting and glazing.

A skilled draftsperson educated at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, Guequierre has received several prestigious awards including two Milwaukee County Emerging Artist fellowships. She has exhibited in the Midwest, including solo exhibitions at the Madison Wisconsin Academy Gallery, the Hermetic Gallery and Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee and group exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum and John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan.

Following is the catalogue Introduction by James DeYoung and an essay by the husband of the Artist, Nathan Guequierre, re-printed with permission of the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum:

Introduction

by James DeYoung

There is a brief moment in each child's life where stories heard meld with the observed adult world. For that brief

moment, there is a balance between innocence and wisdom. The paintings of Jean Roberts Guequierre, with their

child-like clarity, capture that balance.

Upon first viewing her paintings, one is tempted merely to connect the narrative imagery to the titles. One initially

perceives clearly articulated figures, rendered in exquisite detail. They are intent in their endeavors, dutifully acting out

their roles. But as the viewer becomes sated on the apparent tidiness of color, composition and storytelling, an

uneasiness sets in. Within each of Guequierre's works is a personal dialogue at which the viewer can only surmise;

indeed, the artist deliberately creates an undercurrent of ambiguity to counter-balance the patina of simple illustration.

The key to perceiving the true scope of each work, however, is to realize that Guequierre's narratives are not ends in

themselves, but can be a point of departure into new worlds of meaning. The figures, while seemingly engaged with

each other, are too involved with themselves to truly connect. What the viewer really sees is each figure staring

reflectively into the middle distance or positioned to reveal themselves to the viewer (or possibly a mirror) rather than

to the figures with whom they are supposedly interacting.

Because of this self-consciousness of the figures, a transformation of subject takes place, and the paintings become

more universal statements on the human condition that process of maturation through self-awareness and the

examination of personality-defining experiences.

Virtue, Vice, Vanity

by Nathan Guequierre

The Virtues of Old Paintings

Of course, there are many reasons people visit art museums to look at old paintings: old paintings are havens of

beauty, locations where the beautiful has been distilled and purified, set in high relief against the mundane and

destitute visual environment that often surrounds us; old paintings appeal to religious sentiment; old paintings appeal

to a sense of orderliness, the countless virgins, saints, crucifixions, depositions endlessly varying a small handful of

subjects; perhaps people hope to make a visceral connection to the distant past, to see distorted reflections of

themselves in the crowd scenes, in the figures residing in intimate interiors, or, like Rembrandt, in the soldiers casting

lots for Jesus1s clothes at the foot of the cross. Or perhaps the opposite is true, and museum visitors hope to lose

themselves in a past completely unrelated to the here and now.

Of course, there are many reasons to look at old paintings, both for what they show and the ways they show it. Take,

for example, the mysterious world inhabited by the Flemish Primitives painters like Jan Van Eyck, Rogier

VanderWeyden and Hans Memling, who worked in Brugge at the turn of the 15th century which so obviously are the

jumping-off point for the paintings of Jean Roberts Guequierre. The world they depict seems so different from our

own, with its deep colors, its fantasy backgrounds and stiff figures. There is no photographic "realism" in paintings

from the age before photography. There is no reliance on the tricks of perspective in paintings from the age when that

science was imperfectly understood. And there is an attendant catalog of visual effects resulting from these "lacks" that

seem naive now -- Jesus ascending reveals only feet and ankles dangling from the top of pictorial space -- but their real

effect is to give the paintings of five or six centuries ago a sense of intellectual exertion: these artists were struggling to

find ways to depict a world. They were making up the rules as they played the game.

The Vice of Believing What You See

The problem, of course, is that these paintings are so attractive that one is tempted to believe they somehow

represent the world as people actually experienced it in the past. Things were simpler then: no one doubted the

existence of God, ambition was held in check by a rigid system of mores, miraculous events were commonplace, death

had meaning.

None of that, of course, is true. The result of believing in that world, a world so alien from the current one that it

actually looked different, is to trivialize its contemplation, this made-up place remote from our own concerns. The

mistake arises from insisting that paintings with realistically rendered figures, architecture, settings are in fact realistic

paintings. It is a tribute to the skill of the Van Eycks, Memlings and VanderWeydens of history that countless viewers,

now, can believe in the erstwhile reality of the worlds they created on gessoed board. Their surfaces are so

preternaturally smooth, their brushstrokes so minute, the hand of the artist so distant, the compositions so airtight that

they don1t allow the breathing of a word of doubt as to their perfection, as to their truth. And that is why, at first

glance, their stories seem so foreign to us, even though they are so aesthetically compelling.

It is that particular sense of pictorial perfection that Guequierre uses to her advantage. We expect hermetic,

self-referring content from paintings like these, full of allusions and codified visual references. If that's a brick tower,

it must be St. Barbara. But easy answers are what Guequierre doesn1t provide, only their outward appearance.

The Vanity of Assuming the Present is Different from the Past

But even though the painters of the era preceding the Renaissance didn't know the joy of cellphones and DVD

players, of transcontinental air travel and 401Ks, it is mere hubris that causes us to imagine their lives were any

"simpler" than our own. Any more naive, more full of certainty, less important for being unmodern. That their

consciences were clearer or their goals less lofty. In truth, the world the Flemish Primitives depict is the same fictional

one depicted in any Modern painting, in any photograph taken at any time during the last century and a half, in any

newscast that slipped into your home this week.

And because it's fiction, that means that you can overlay your own stories on top of that world, on top of any of those

pictures. That's the crux of the Jean Roberts Guequierre's refusal to let rest the idiosyncratic images, compositions,

gestures, surfaces of pre-Renaissance painting. Those artists were making up the rules as they went along, finding a way

to depict not their lives, but the stories they needed to tell, narrating the grandest themes of human experience on the

smallest, most personal scales.

To make up the rules as the game is played is an attribute normally ascribed to Modernism. But Guequierre's

paintings are well past Modern. Rather than seeking to distort experience through reduction, Guequierre indulges in

the glory of maximums: maximum imagery, maximum depth, maximum ambiguity, maximum latitude to wander

about inside the paintings. The worlds she creates seem unfamiliar, but don't assume that there1s no room for you in

them.

This page was originally published in Resource Library Magazine. Please see Resource Library's Overview section for more information. rev. 6/3/11

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