Art Reviews

THE DETROIT NEWS-Sunday, Sept. 11. 1983

Focus exhibit isn't afraid to shock

By Joy Hakanson Colby News Special Writer

Some of the things the Detroit Focus Gallery does best are represented in a three-person show which opened the alternative space's sixth season last night. The exhibit introduces a newcomer to the local exhibition scene, Deborah White. It fea tures a potentially explosive theme by painter Stephen Goodfellow. And it encourages Robert Vandervennet's site-specific sculpture, which is attached to the floors and walls of 743 Beaubien.

These three Detroiters were selected by the Focus Review Committee made up of local artists. This is the second of a two-part exhibit and it's even better than last spring's trio with Harry Zmijewski, Patricia Dorsey and Robert Bailey.

THE BEAUTY of an alternative exhibition space like Focus is that artists can show what they want without worrying about whether the work is salable or even pleasing to the public at large. In fact, the Focus audience looks for a different kind of art experience from artists without proven track records in the galleries.

In the present show, Goodfellow is the one with the most exposure. He's affiliated with the Xochipilli Gallery in Birmingham and had a one-man show there a couple of seasons ago. However, he felt that a group of paintings dealing with violence would be more at home in downtown Detroit than in Birmingham. He's right.

Goodfellow's canvases contain references to modera films, comic strips and his own British heritage by way of satirists Hogarth and Rowland- son. He cross-pollinates these elements and comes up with some distinctive images.

HE CATCHES the sudden flash of anger between a dining couple when the man pulls a cloth off the table. Dishes tly and red wine splashes in islandy droplets. Faces are contorted. The emotion becomes palpable and spills over into the galley.

Game Show, with its tied-up female nudes surrounded by cars and appliances, is an exercise in sadomasochism. A snake-like microphone cord wraps around the smarmy host dressed in green. The foreground is filled with leering faces.

Goodfellow deals with organized crime and prostitution a repulsive study of gangsters and nude women. A figure called Icon wears a lethal mask and pri A stagey Pyramid looks like a Crossb drive-in movie and an evil varia- tion.Star Wars set. The most violent work of 4:1 shows two robbers ransacking a house after trussing up the owner and hanging his two cats. This one brings to mind the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange.

THE UNLOVELY content of these paintings contrasts oddly with their inner luminosity. They fairly glow with strong, clear colors. Goodfellow has developed his own way of working with gum stencils and the three primary colors-red, yellow and blue.

He creates blocks with the gum arabic and sprays thin layers of paint on the canvas. Between each stage, the water soluble gum is washed off. leaving only the paint on areas desired. When all three colors are completed, the range of the color

NEWS PHOTO/MICHELLE ANDCHAN

(Image): Robert Vandervennet poses with his sculptures devoted to tension and compression. The built-on-site works are part of a three-person show at Detroit Focus Gallery.

spectrum emerges. Because the paint is applied in such thin layers, Goodfellow explains, the light penetrates through the layers and reflects off the white primer. The artist's background in print- making helped him develop this method of paint- ing.

Ma. White's prisma-color pencil drawings pick up on the mood in Goodfellow's canvases. She uses biomorphic forms in landscape or still life formats. At first, the pictures look familiar, as if we were about to recognize our favorite houseplant or gar- den vista. Then suddenly, everything turns weird and we are confronted with the landscape of night- mares. Colors change from pastel-pretty to omi- nous. And it becomes apparent that the artist has done very well indeed at creating her own slice of Surrealism.

VANDERVENNET extends the context pro- vided by the other two artists with his sculptures that deal with tension and compression. He bal- ances sheets of glass without any mechanical bonds to hold them in place. He builds the pieces for specific sites. That, he points out, is in itself a ten- sion situation because he's never quite sure that a particular piece is going to work until it has been built.

For instance, three sheets of glass held by a four- by-six-foot maple beam depend on tension set up by a car jack holding the beam in place. There are no notches, no glue to hold the large glass sheets. The beam is broken in three places to accept the glass and the ends are covered with felt to smooth the bond. But the rest relies upon a specific kind of tension that Vandervennet hadn't tried before he set up the piece at Focus.

Another small sculpture uses pipe clamps to bal- ance a heavy clay tube on several sheets of thin glass. The piece seems straightforward enough until you study it. Then the balancing act seems so 'precarious that it induces a sense of anxiety in the viewer. This sense of unease works very well with the other exhibitors' works.

The three-person show will be on view through Oct. 15 at 743 Beaubien.