Michael Workman

In Von Kommanivanh's imagined world, darkness rules. His show at the West Loop's Walsh Gallery is a sustained reflection on the experiences of his youth in America, starting in 1983 after moving here from Laos, Thailand in restitution for his family's support during the Vietnam war. His show "Crooked Characters" is comprised of work all from this year, all larger scale, reaching proportions of 107.5" x 136," sizable enough to intimidate but not overwhelm.

Such a personal history as Kommanivanh's may in fact portend darkness, both spiritual and mental. Yet what's at stake here is not the soul-killing gloom that backdrops each canvas, but what it manifests, the foreground of human interaction, of fear, despair, hopeful acceptance of a corruption that the loss of distance permitted by innocence allows. He deals with it, as in the title piece from the show. Here, his darkness creeps in around a portrait of three central figures (presumably specimens of the type of victimhood brought on by the tumult that surrounds them) like the sodden clouding of a sky before rain, and manages to sustain a stunning palette of colors that shouldn't possibly fit together so well. It's a scene of attention-deficit immersion, of existence lived at a perceptual distance from one's self. In this harried foreground, Kommanivanh builds up Basquiat-like fields of cross-cultural referents, using paint that he glops, scrapes and scrawls onto the surface to pile them atop texts of overheard street conversation over portraits of loving mothers coddling crying children, over doodles of accordion players and tanks with raised turrets, childlike figurative scribbles...and it goes on. Drawing informs his style, as does a curiously minimized variant of graffiti. Kommanivanh's canvases trail off into something like a composition (his greatest formal strength) built on personal leitmotifs to which we are offered nothing resembling a Rosetta stone--no translation--nothing but a raw, at times ugly and essentially poetic tapestry of the artist's experience.

It's degrading as often as inspiring. Paint as a material gives way to trashy messes, pages from a limerick book torn out and adhered to the wall in his backroom installation "Couch Art." A room-sized installation, it's just as important that this piece provides visitors a space to physically inhabit as it is that his canvases prevent access to more than a surface: he has covered the walls with paper, paint and detritus, such as the found wooden window frame hung from the ceiling, its dirty glass still intact. In the middle of the room sits a long, narrow white couch into the back of which he has installed speakers playing music to which Kommanivanh listens while working. They're serene, intense, brooding and disjunctive melodies that tow a meditative line.

It's this opaque sense of a psychological barrier that Kommanivanh has conjured here, with all the delirious opacity of an addiction. Denial of his difference and a longing for acceptance where he may find none informs every brushstroke. None of his canvases--physically larger than past works due to the artist's move to a studio spacious enough to accommodate work on a larger scale--have gone through the sorting process that distinguishes affinities and which will inevitably separate them out into distinct modes or themes. Instead, it's a flood or symbols: a one-eyed space invader (from the video game) floats past a line that sounds like it could have come from a movie script: "out of drugs..." Aptly, it's from a piece titled "Depicted Street."

The rare power present in Kommanivanh's work evokes all the movement of city life, and of Chicago as seen from a street level similar to how, say (humbly), a weekly column records the experience of urban life. Day by day, crashing one week into the next: but what's missing here and what Kommanivanh clearly attempts to capture is a frozen moment of those evils, those things most "crooked" in his experience, and evidenced in the portraiture both of individuals and of the highly-textured experience of our culture, a perverting--perhaps political--influence which he stubbornly refuses to name. Instead, he alludes and eludes, with all the deftness and knowing ease required to mimic a nervous tension in his hand-drawn line. He passes over in silence that which he cannot bring himself to confront: the destructive effects of such a violent uprooting on his family, the inequities of a xenophobic society now his own. That much of his style may have been borrowed from Basquiat matters less than what Kommanivanh has made of it: he has transformed sensation into aesthetic, avoiding the usual underpinning of narcissism and the gestural preoccupation with self-destructive or suicidal compulsions that attend such an approach to art. It's damning stuff, and he knows it.

Correction

On a late night (for me) in a crowded room with a pen in one hand and the blank back of business card in the other, it was possible only to write two names: Majorie Susman and Heather Pesanti. One curated the Lobby Gallery exhibit "A Sense of Place: Emerging Chicago Sculpture," reviewed last week in this column, and was incorrectly identified. The other has a curatorial fellowship in her name at the MCA. It was Pesanti who picked the Lobby gallery show.

Von Kommanivanh shows at Walsh Gallery, 118 North Peoria, (312)829-3312, through September 3.

(2005-07-26)

Also by Michael Workman

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If there's any single art form constantly in jeopardy of not having enough practitioners, it's sculpture
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This past weekend prompted pangs of despondency during a visit to the not-for-profit Gallery 312's clearance sale, held in a room in a building at 845 West Fulton Market where it has lived since being displaced from its original home at 312 North May Street
(2005-07-19)

Eye Exam
Dan Flavin has been dead since 1996 when he left us at the age of 63, and it's just now that a retrospective of his work is making the rounds
(2005-07-05)

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"Drawn Out," a new exhibition at the University of Illinois Gallery 400, examines the capability of drawing to move between artistic mediums
(2005-06-28)

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(2005-06-24)

Eye Exam
(2005-06-15)

Tip of the Week
(2005-06-09)

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(2005-06-09)

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(2005-05-24)

Tip of the Week
(2005-05-24)

Eye Exam
(2005-05-10)

Eye Exam
(2005-04-26)

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