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Indepth Arts News:
"Virtues, Vices, Vanities: Paintings by Jean Roberts Guequierre"
2001-11-19 until 2002-01-06
Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum
Milwaukee, WI,
USA United States of America
Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum presents
Virtues, Vices, Vanities: Paintings by Jean Roberts Guequierre. 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.
Remarks and Gallery Talk admission is $5 General, $3 Students with ID and
Members.
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.
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