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The Art of Suburbia
Un Pueblo Blanco transforms suburban monotony
By Alfredo Triff
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Claudia Scalise’s Un Pueblo Blanco is showing at the
Dorsch Gallery through April 5. |
My being is invisible, incommensurably folded in a leaf of grass,
submerged in smallness. San Peter’s mass shining in the lock’s
hole,
Byzantium
hanging by a tear. — Olga Orozco
Claudia Scalise’s Un Pueblo Blanco (A White Town), a show
of landscape oil paintings at the Dorsch Gallery, started with her
afternoon and weekend walks around her
South Miami neighborhood. Scalise, an art professor at Miami Dade
College, felt attracted to the architectural plainness of these
cookie-cutter suburban developments — the uniformity of façade,
driveway, car and alley-greenery followed by the same, block after
block.
It wasn’t supposed to be like that. American suburbia, originally
inspired by the rich tradition of 19th-century English vernacular
(with its gardens displaying a medley of herbs, vegetables, fruit
and flowers) has all but disappeared by the brute force of
functional homogenization of late capitalism. It’s definitely a
challenge to render these developments aesthetic (Dan Graham’s
1965 series “Home for America,” in which he examined the potential
variations in style and color of serial housing, being a notable
example).
With precise and — at times — minimal brushwork, Scalise
transforms the monotony and isolation of present-day suburbia into
a sort of subjective, semi-abstract Lloydwrightian Broadacre,
sandwiched in between highways. At a different level, her little
paintings strike a fine line between the veridical Ashcan school
and the more buoyant regionalist themes developed immediately
after
Roosevelt’s
New Deal in the late 1930s.
Each image is limited by a center cross section with two
additional vertical lines. A uniform white color covers all but
the four-sided area with the actual landscape. The first thing one
notices is the diminutive size of these pieces.
Scalise’s aesthetic and political gesture cannot pass unnoticed.
In the world of contemporary art, size matters. In fact, the
history of American Modern painting can be seen as a size-race
reaching Brobdingnagian proportions in the mid-1950s at the
peak of Abstract Expressionism
(more than one feminist critic has pointed to the relationship
between gender and size in a world where most American masters are
men). On the other hand, miniature art is a quasi-forgotten
tradition practiced by women in Persian, Indian and Ottoman art.
Scalise’s palette moves from warmer to colder, from realistic to
somewhat abstract, from careful details to overlapping, blurred
fields of color. We see the one-perspective side street along a
parapet wall with trees behind it, interspersed with a bit of
grass, the stop sign and the electric pole, leading to an elevated
highway, or the lawn-bounded town pavilion dotted with the America
flag. There’s a highway curve in detail, the green trash
receptacle outside a house’s backyard, or the BMW parked against
almost blurred cream-colored walls.
Un Pueblo Blanco
makes sense: “white” stands for hue, “pure” and “bare.” Most of
the paintings in the exhibition belong to the series “Escenas de
Fantoche” (meaning “little pretentious” or “puppet-like scenes”).
In Scalise’s world, the main abode of middle-class America,
metaphorically speaking, a “bare suburban space,” ends up
Lilliputian. The artist’s emphasis on smallness and blankness
brings to mind a line from The Other Side of the Sky by
Argentinean Modern poet Olga Orozco: “No one pays attention to my
invisible side printed on these walls.” Thus, we have the series
“Ida y Vuelta en Juguetes” (Back and Forth with Toys), a group of
even smaller framed wooden pieces portraying furniture, such as a
wardrobe, armchair, oven and bed.
The exhibit suggests that, in spite of the social and
aesthetic anomie typical of suburbia, one cannot ignore that (at a
more fundamental level) this is where actual people live and work.
Scalise brings forth the difficulty of representing our subjective
space.
Scalise’s exhibition goes hand in hand with French sociologist and
critic Henri Lefebvre’s idea that it’s always possible to mobilize
private life to restore the body through the sensory-sensual. Art
is precisely that.
Claudia Scalise’s
Un Pueblo Blanco is showing through April 5 at the Dorsch
Gallery,
151 N.W. 24th St.,
Miami;
305-576-1278.
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