Michael Workman

A former Navy man and tattoo artist, George Klauba explores his journeys, on both land and sea, through mythologized scenes of acrylic on panel. Many will recognize scenes from his latest exhibition at River North's Ann Nathan Gallery from the pages of Melville's classic novel, "Moby Dick." But Klauba takes scenes from that novel as only the starting point for his uniform "18x14.5" panels, transforming the novel's lead players into fantasy characters half-human, half-beast. Specifically, birds. Klauba's canvases also incorporate the wild and brazen imagery that's the subject of much tattoo art into the fantasy elements of his work as a painter. It's as if the great white whale at the symbolic center of Melville's story has spread like venom, its pure "creature-ness" (and the implied "evil" of that condition) mutating the flawed humanity of Ishmael and Ahab. His images recall the jarring discovery in Norman O. Brown's 1959 book "Life Against Death" of an anxiety hidden in the poetry of Jonathan Swift: that beauty is "all head and wings, with no bottom to betray it."

So it goes. Our popular culture flatly rejects the body in anything less than an idealized form, and this denial makes a certain basic sense. It's devastating to face the fact that we're all basically animals, against which our hopeful ideals of beauty and all things "transcendent" or divine must inevitably fall short. In this sense, we live a debased reality: devouring the meat of our prey and passing their waste from our bodies until, eventually, our limbs shrivel, our eyes go white with blindness. Senescence and death disprove any sense of our selves as higher beings. Klauba, notably, costumes only the heads and faces of Melville's seafaring cast, transplanting onto them the heads of birds, leaving his subjects "avis transformata," metaphoric composites of this never-ending struggle against our own baser instincts. His color palette, an intense range of blue and reds couched in swathes of dense black, enhances this sense of existential dread. In "The Pod," for example, larger groups of white whales attack smaller ones, the surface of the ocean adrift with bodies and bright red blood. In his imagery, the sea thus serves as a metaphor for the subconscious Darwinian battleground wherein man pits himself against his own suppressed animal nature.

Which side wins? Klauba doesn't answer by painting his subjects into some fallen bestial reality, but as imaginary actors in a cosmology of human hope and despair. In this universe, for example, "Stubb" gets pictured as a street tough with skewed cap and rolled-up sleeves, magically standing in the water astride his boat while a miniature whale floats before him, belly-up in the sea foam. Pulling back the flesh with his beak, Stubb calmly and methodically works a knife and fork into its innards, hands stained a dark crimson to the wrists. Obviously, he has no problem swallowing this animal reality. And "Queequeg" here takes on all the airs of an avian mystic, his long beak protruding from a feathered face, the pate of his skull drawn back to reveal a glowing row of houses in a tropical forest; his intricately tattooed hand grasps the shaft of a long whaling lance. Absorbed in the memory of his far-flung home, he maintains a stately poise. While Klauba may thus situate man in eternal combat against his own inner demons he has also chosen to outfit them with the features of these few capable of soaring high above the fray.

Color Wonderful

At Roy Boyd Gallery, also in River North, Russian-born artist Vadim Katznelson eschews figurative for pure material abstraction. His color selections are key. In his exhibit, "For Paint's Sake," it distends off the canvas in an array of configurations that shift and change in the eye. Katznelson's exploration of how paint functions as a visual medium has led him to plow through acrylic with trowels, shape it into pepper-like bells or to mold oil into a repeated pattern across surfaces equally valid as bark on a tree or sheets of rain.

He's accomplished some philosophical feats, too, allowing his paints to burst out with a bounty of colors and hues. In a piece called "Porcelain," for instance, he has shaped globules of blue, gray, brown, black and white paint into a solid surface, as if they were balls of cotton. Its texture is abraded and furrowed, giving it a soft, fuzzy feeling. In a second piece, "O.K. Lumberjack," he has taken the same acrylic oil resin on panel and expanded the palette dramatically, including an even wider range of colors. Not only that, but Katznelson has also forcibly ruptured the globules at their furrows, like bursting outward the ridges in a fingerprint between cells of skin. Inside, more colors are exposed: green against yellow, yellow against orange. It's a material that's more than the sum of its own substance: his paint, while presenting the unified whole of a solid surface on one panel, reveals yet another material layer just beneath its surface in another. And, we are meant to suppose, yet another remains hidden just beneath that.

It's a tribute to paint's ability to contain the basic physical traits of both a whole and its constituent parts. But more than that, given Katznelson's ability to infuse the finished panels with his own joy at the play between form and color, what we're shown is paint's ability to preserve traces of naked human emotion. Infectious too, as they're as much a joy to behold as they were to make.

George Klauba shows at Ann Nathan Gallery, 212 West Superior, (312)664-6622. Through March 15. Vadim Katznelson shows Roy Boyd Gallery, 739 North Wells, (312)642-1606. Through March 15.

(2005-02-15)

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