Portrait painting since the mid-19th century has been more about
artistic self-expression and aesthetics than about commemoration or
documentation, the new medium of photography having briskly assumed
those pedestrian functions. Picasso’s megalithic painting of Gertrude
Stein is more about observer than subject; likewise, Whistler’s
“Arrangement in Grey and Black,” with its subhead, “Portrait of the
Artist’s Mother” (added only after public outcry), and his subsequent
portrait of Thomas Carlyle, given the same detached title, with an
appended “No. 2.” (The paintings, naturally, surpass their distanced
monikers.) Modernist artists were more interested in formal innovation
than in reportage or reality (or consensus reality, anyway), and while
postmodernists ventured into the real-world issues of race and
politics, their work often shared the scientific-bureaucratic look and
affect of minimalism and conceptualism, seasoned with theory and
irony.
The works in Portraits from Far and Near by Susan
Matthews and Lisa Esherick derive from the realist tradition (though
modernized), and they’re less about recreational aesthetics than they
are about transforming our attitude toward reality. Capitalism in its
more toxic manifestations makes us consider everything in terms of
money; these portraits, to coin a phrase, put people first. They
reassert the inherent dignity of human life — nearby, in the
stores of Shattuck Avenue or, somewhat farther removed, the studios of
North Carolina (Esherick); and afar, in the villages and settlements of
sub-Saharan Africa (Matthews). While both artists share a humanistic
vision, they do differ in temperament and approach. Matthews
symbolically depicts her subjects, the Hausa villagers and nomadic
Wodaabis of Niger. Working from photographs, she transforms her
subjects with their brilliant, beautiful clothing and handicrafts, into
something like secular icons, timeless figures set against heavenly
gold and silver backgrounds (“When It Rains It Pours,” “The Newlywed,”
“Man from Tasha Ibrahiim”). (A portion of Matthews’ sales,
incidentally, benefit a Wodaabi grain bank.) Esherick is more
empirical, finding interest in faces, character, and environment, and
in their transcription into painterly markings. They, too, are based on
photos, but the effect is more casual and less hieratic — even
her portraits of fellow resident artists done on Gothic ogival arched
panels. Esherick’s Berkeley businesspeople (at General Appliance,
Paul’s, Alko, Herbivore, Newberry’s Gifts, and Stonemountain &
Daughter), painted in traditional rectangular formats, regard the
viewer (or customer) with a calm dignity that seems, in these frazzled
times, almost otherworldly. Portraits from Far and Near runs
through May 30 at Addison Street Window Gallery (2018 Addison
St., Berkeley). CityofBerkeley.info or
510-981-7546.
