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Strokes of Genius
How strange. There's no one there, but the scene is filled with presence. Someone must have just gone out. Christopher Gallego's "Interior with Three Rooms" in Strokes of Genius at the Cincinnati Art Museum is taller than you are, hung with its lower edge just inches from the floor, and broad as a doorframe. You could walk right in. People stop in front of it every day, imagining themselves in this light-suffused space. They/we are standing before a double doorway, looking into an adjoining room with another room beyond. Light floods in from windows seen and unseen and is reflected on any receiving surface. Bare wood floors are unevenly polished, a door is held open by a ceramic crock and on the table in the middle room we see a coffee cup, a bowl, a newspaper. The coffee pot itself, out on a table in the enclosed porch that is the far room, is nearly empty; the morning must be half gone. With near-voyeuristic fascination we search out details, even in the shadows. To the right of the middle doorway a drawing is posted. It shows another room, fitted out with what seems to be a sink. A bathroom? A kitchen? And at the right edge of what we can see of the middle room there's the slightest suggestion of what we can't. An extended table leg meets the floor, the table's edge protrudes slightly, there is the curve of a teapot's spout, all cut off by the doorframe we look past. In this homely setting an exposed radiator, a telephone, potholders hanging from a hook, a baseboard electric outlet, a phone jack are meticulously, even lovingly, depicted. It is wonderful. We want to be there. The wall label tells us that the painting was worked on over a period of years, 1996-2000, and that the artist himself says, "I think of these pieces not as scenes but as records of an artist's dialogue with the visual world." Keep talking, Mr. Gallego. |
