Csilla Sadloch’s four virtuoso paintings hanging at Schmidt/Dean make a nice pairing with Fritz Dietel’s sculptures in the main gallery space (see yesterday’s post).
They are both about nature, but what a difference a point of view makes!
Sadloch paints pristine images about the profusion of nature. Her densely woven imagery fills the canvas top to bottom, left to right and front to back–and even underneath the painted-on mat–with not a lot of breathing room (shown, “Two Beans”).
With their perfection of craft, Sadloch’s paintings seem to be about a human desire to control nature. And with the paint subservient to the imagery, the work is also about the painter’s absolute need to control materials. Even the sides of the paintings, which are on thick wood panels, have been considered and finished with paint.
In contrast, Dietel’s sculptures seem to be about man’s fragility in the natural world. I take his sculptures as living, breathing stand-ins for humans.
In terms of subject matter—Sadloch’s take on human dominance of nature seems modern enough, but painter dominance of the medium seems to belong to some century past—a nice fit with the still lifes (shown, Eric L. Conklin’s “Tied Up;” Conklin has some similar work on exhibit at More) from the Trompe l’Oeil Society over at More Gallery (presented in association with Rittenhouse Fine Art).
