EVOKATION | January 2023 issue

EVOKATION

FEBRUARY 2O23

An EVOKE Contemporary publication

CALENDAR OF EVENTS 2O23

All events take place at EVOKE Contemporary, 550 S. Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501. Visit evokecontemporary.com to sign up for special previews and for further information.

Feb 24 ProofofLife,Part3 | Francis DiFronzo releases recent paintings romancing the beauty and solitude of the American West.

On display through March 25, 2023.

Mar 31 Listen to the Paint | Harriet Yale Russell’s vivid response to world events is revealed in this exhibition. On display through April 22, 2023.

Apr 28 Flora & Fauna | A spring immersion in nature takes over the gallery with this verdant display of Mother Nature’s abundant splendor and regeneration. On display through May 20, 2023.

May 26 SlowMagic | Soey Milk presents new paintings in this highly anticipated figurative exhibition. On display through June 24, 2023.

A NOTE FROM EVOKE

Jun 30 ArtintheMaking,EssaysByArtistsAbout WhatTheyDo | Santa Fe book launch, exhibition, and lecture series by the contributing essayists from the book co-published by The Fisher Press and The John Stevens Shop.

On display through August 19, 2023.

Aug 25 LynnBoggess | An exhibition of the artist’s ongoing tribute to our majestic wooded landscapes. On display through September 23, 2023.

Aug 25 LordsburgProject | Esha Chiocchio uses her photography to document grassland restoration in Southwestern New Mexico. On display through September 23, 2023.

Sep 29 LostProphets | Thomas Vigil explores the idea that every individual, well-recognized or not, has a powerful voice within them in this solo exhibition. On display through October 21, 2023.

We welcome you to Evoke Contemporary to experience the emotive, meditative world of Francis DiFronzo in an exhibition of new paintings that inspire existential contemplation. From there we embrace the lively, imaginative art of Harriet Yale Russell. Her mixed-media creations express the artist’s responses to current world events such as the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Mid-spring, we immerse the gallery in a lush group exhibition, Flora & Fauna, which looks at the diverse ways in which nature has been an enduring subject for artists since time immemorial.

And stay tuned for exciting news about a special project, to be announced in our May issue. Until then, we look forward to telling you more about that big launch!

Special thanks to Amie Tullius, Richard Lehnert, and Mara Christian Harris for their work on this issue.

Kathrine Erickson + Elan Varshay Owners and Publishers

On the cover: Michael Sott, Divining Water (detail), oil on canvas, 58” x 87”.

What Remains: Sentinels and Relics Francis DiFronzo

In Francis DiFronzo’s paintings, titles often work like the last line of a haiku, opening up the world of the painting, or presenting a completely different point of view. Like haiku—a poetic form that often celebrates the natural world while illuminating concepts of deep spiritual emptiness and impermanence—DiFronzo’s paintings are full of both beauty and existential loneliness.

Using oil over gouache and watercolor, Francis DiFronzo paints highly realistic, delicately rendered landscapes—most often dusky desertscapes—strewn with the detritus of human culture and industry. Railroad cars and tracks, telephone poles, boats, rocks, and roadside signs. An abandoned Chevy station wagon under a derelict streetlight. On a sign isolated on a scrubby range, Bob’s Big Boy holding aloft a fiberglass burger. The paintings are extremely open, extremely spare. They feel lonely, mysterious, even ominous, frequently inhabited by railcars but never an actual human being. One begins to wonder about their absence—are any people left in DiFronzo’s worlds?

Like two of his major creative influences, Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, Francis DiFronzo is a storyteller. The

subjects of his paintings look as if painted from life, as if they must exist somewhere. DiFronzo says that with his realism he wants to create a feeling of authenticity, even if that feeling is completely fabricated. “It allows the viewer to go into the world,” he says, “and wonder: ‘Why is he painting this place? I wonder where this is? I wonder what happened here?’ It pulls the viewer into a world that they presume exists in real life. And that’s all in the art of storytelling.”

DiFronzo’s paintings are so realistic, so convincing, that it’s difficult to accept that he works primarily from imagination. He has a nearly photographic memory—once he’s painted something, he says, it’s committed to memory, and he can re-create it later. He then can also mix and remix various elements of things he’s painted into new paintings. The deserts, for example, read as real places but are actually amalgams of a number of different Western deserts. “I’m just sort of imagining them, and I don’t know what deserts they are,” DiFronzo says.

“I live in California, so there’s the Mojave. But I’m not sure I’m painting the Mojave desert. . . . The feeling is more important than the place.”

Above: Francis DiFronzo, Crossing Paths,Part 2, oil over gouache and watercolor on panel, 25” × 59”.

“I’ve always loved the landscape in painting,” DiFronzo continues, “because it’s where we live. The environment is where we live our dramas out . . . I do very much see the landscape as a stage.” Then, to tell his stories on the stage of the desert, he uses the things he finds in the desert. “They become my subjects, and depending on how they’re composed, how they’re lit, they tell different stories.”

After spending some time with DiFronzo’s paintings, you start to notice that the objects have a subtle gestural quality that makes them feel like characters. However, DiFronzo deploys these gestures with such a light touch that his paintings read almost less like paintings than as photos in which a very lucky photographer’s eye has happened to capture a moment that humans can’t help but read as a relationship, a mood, an intention.

“I think, as an artist, you have to be generous and give people things to respond to,” DiFronzo says, “and not be too opaque—you have to let them in. But not be so obvious at the same time. To let their emotions and feelings roam through the work, and feel what they feel. I love Hopper

because of the way he simplifies things; it’s like he’s refining his ideas to balance the most essential elements. And then he’s giving them to you, and he’s letting you go with them— and go whatever direction you want to go. But I love the simple isolation—the loneliness. Not lonely in a bad sense, though. There’s just this quietness to Hopper, a peacefulness that lets you think and reflect upon what he’s painted.”

DiFronzo began his Proof of Life series four years ago, after the death of a friend. Attempting to process her passing, he says, “I was painting a desert dirt road. It was a night scene. And there was a telephone pole, and there was a streetlight . . . but I decided to not paint the streetlight, and just painted a light. It was like a floating orb in the sky.” It brought to mind for him a painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Annunciation.

The Proof of Life series has since become DiFronzo’s conversation with Tanner’s 1898 painting. He transposed some of its elements and themes onto the deserts of the American West, and the relics humans might leave there once we’re gone. “I have a lot to say on this matter,” he says. But how to interpret what DiFronzo has to say is up to the viewer.

Francis DiFronzo, Crossing Paths, Part 3, oil over gouache and watercolor on panel, 36” × 72”.

And the trains that continually reappear in DiFronzo’s paintings? He loved trains when little, as many boys do. “But,” he says, “they sort of evolved for me. I became obsessed with them as being these really frightening objects.” He used to dream about them. Then, early on in college, while experimenting with filmmaking, he and his crew had a near-death experience while shooting a short film.

“We were filming on what we thought was an abandoned train line,” DiFronzo says. “We were filming in a tunnel out in the Mojave desert. And all of a sudden, the tunnel was lit up. We heard this roaring noise, and we all jumped off the tracks and put our backs up against the tunnel wall. And suddenly this train was going by at, like, 70 miles per hour, sucking us toward the tracks. It was terrifying.”

“We all survived,” he says, “but it was really just an awful experience. We all thought we were going to die. This thing was, like, two miles long. It just kept going and going and going at this very high speed, with a deafening noise. It was like a nightmare. It was like being in a tornado.”

After that, DiFronzo became even more fascinated with trains. He began to think about how trains fit into humans’ lives, and how they have a history all their own—“how they’ll outlive us,” he says; “how they’ll just be sitting there through the centuries. . . . I like how they’re these sentinels of the desert.” Sentinels surrounded by gravel, track, wispy clouds, and washes of sundown sky. Perhaps a boxcar’s doors are open to the sky beyond. Perhaps there’s a crossing sign. The incessant, incalculable emptiness of the desert is acutely present.

Francis DiFronzo, Zero Hour, Part 2, oil over gouache and watercolor on panel, 24” × 48”.

Listen to the Paint: Harriet Yale Russell

To visit the studio of artist Harriet Yale Russell is to enter the fervently creative mind of its occupant made manifest. Here, stacks of heavy watercolor paper; there, an easel displaying a work in progress; over there, an inadvertent collage of works on paper layered on a wall. On a worktable are an artist’s expected brushes and paints, along with less conventional tools: handmade tissue stencils, inks, and toothbrushes. Post-it notes scatter surfaces in the studio: “Listen to the paint”; “New? Give it time”; “Color in one place only.” Classical music pipes from a radio in the corner—“Music is my driver,” says Russell. “I try to be neat but am often overtaken by pots of paint,” she says, laughing. This somewhat anarchic environment belies the disciplined work schedule of the artist who works here as many hours as possible in a day.

Russell grew up in Rochester, New York, and attended a progressive school whose motto was “To thine own self be true,” a maxim to which she has tried to remain true throughout her life. She attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she taught etching for ten years. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, where, after traveling and painting in the Azores and Portugal for 18 months, she taught drawing for two years in Richard Diebenkorn’s teaching studio. She moved to Cuba, New Mexico, in 1992, and in 2017 to Santa Fe, where she now lives and works full time.

Primarily a painter of large-scale abstracts, Russell has shifted her focus in the last three years. “When the pandemic hit, it changed everything. It was hard on me, but also wonderful.” Her current body of work is a response to and exploration

Above: Harriet Yale Russell, Chasing Shapes, gouache on paper, 22.25” × 30.25”. Opposite top to bottom: Harriet Yale Russell, Pangea, gouache on paper, 22.25” × 30.25”. Harriet Yale Russell, White Horses on the Black Sea, gouache on paper, 17” × 20.5”.

of her experience of the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and nightmares. Russell revels in the freedoms of abstraction, even on a smaller scale. “Your only restriction is yourself,” she says. While her subjects are serious, Russell enjoys playing with graphic elements and media—in person, her very present sense of humor is a contrast with the solemnity of her themes. Her work is smaller and

darker than before, yet more playful. “I’m much more focused than ever before—I’m doing something very personal.”

In a series called Nightmares, Russell explores her feelings about the pandemic in smaller works. “It was a scary time—I was alone. I needed something dark here.” She worked from impulse to impulse in black and white gouache on gray paper, with occasional focal points of subtle color. Combinations of geometric and amorphous shapes play with the concepts of the clear and the unclear. Russell explores how she works, playing with values and shapes in the highly flexible medium of gouache. Dripping, scraping, and overpainting, the artist works through techniques, composition, and shapes.

When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, in February 2022, Russell felt it keenly; not only because it was a cataclysmic world event, but also because it was personal—she has family in Poland. Inspired by maps, many of the works in her series Ukraine straddle the line between drawing and painting and evoke landscapes as seen from above—topographical features, roads, towns, train tracks. White Horses on a Black Sea is an aerial perspective on whitecaps on the Baltic Sea; in another painting, Moving Ukraine, Russell envisions moving Ukraine to the Caribbean for a rest.

“We never know what’s going to happen,” Russell says. “I could make a painting that saves the world so we don’t have wars, so we’re kind to each other. You can’t really do that, but you can do something that affects the viewer. I just hope my work goes out and speaks to someone!”

Top to bottom: Harriet Yale Russell, Moving Ukraine, gouache on paper, 16.75” × 20.75”.

Harriet Yale Russell, Yearn for Softened Edges, gouache on paper, 16.75” x 20.5”.

Harriet Yale Russell, War on Snow, gouache on paper, 17” x 20.75”.

—Mara Christian Harris

Flora & Fauna: A Celebration of Spring

How do we interpret nature? Do we look to conquer it, live with it, feel it, understand it? Four of the artists featured in Flora & Fauna have each found ways to see nature in new ways. Which, ultimately, is why nature makes such an excellent muse—it’s always present, ever changing, infinitely interesting.

Michael Scott’s landscapes come alive not with people, but with the interaction of the four elements of nature: earth, air, fire, water. Primeval mossy forests are on fire, lit with shafts of light, bisected by streams and waterfalls, or struck by lightning. Seashores roil with crashing waves or morning mists. Scott’s landscapes draw from memory, archetypes, and iconic works of the American canon, and embody the primacy

of place and an isolated grandeur. His paintings aim not to capture a landscape’s particularity, as such, but to infuse it with the regenerative spirit of nature itself. He brings to the work his own sense of wonder, enabling viewers to engage with it form their own points of view. They are rewarded with a portal into America’s wild places, where the elements take center stage.

Above: Michael Scott, Divining Water, oil on canvas, 58” x 87”.

Ester Curini’s work is a call to action for the preservation of essential wildlife. Her larger-than-life portraits of animals against a stark white background have visceral impact—the eyes of her subject creatures gaze directly at the viewer, challenging our assumptions about the intelligence of each species. Curini’s subjects are individual animals that have been victims of humans: endangered, pushed out of their natural environment, neglected, or abused. Wolves, ravens, rescued farm animals—each gets the opportunity to have a voice through their compelling presence and direct gaze. Curini raises awareness for the preservation of wildlife with her lifelong compassion and commitment as expressed through her art.

Irene Hardwicke Olivieri’s fantastical, highly detailed, and deeply personal paintings present a natural world with few divisions between animals, people, and plants as the artist explores themes of mortality, love and relationships, and obsession. Primarily a painter, Olivieri also makes things out of tiny bones, bringing skeletons back to life. “An ongoing theme in my work is rewilding the heart,” she says, “to inspire deeper connections to wild animals and wild lands.”

Ester Curini, The Creator of Light, acrylic on Belgian linen, 20” x 18”.

Ester Curini, Qui e Ora, acrylic on Belgian linen, 20” x 16”.

Irene Hardwicke Olivieri, There came a day, oil on wood, 21” x 66.5”.

Through his landscapes, renowned Canadian artist David T. Alexander hopes to instill feelings less of reverence than of presence. In landscapes that are close to pure abstractions, he often applies paint with a gestural hand that captures nature’s force and flow. “Abstraction allows freedom,” he says. “I try to describe not what [a landscape] looks like but how it feels.”

—Mara Christian Harris

David T. Alexander, Shallows and Shadows, acrylic on panel, 9” x 12”.

David T. Alexander, Kaloya Freeze Happening As I Observe, acrylic on panel, 9” x 12”.

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EVOKATION is published three times annually by EVOKE Contemporary, 550 S. Guadalupe St., Santa Fe, NM 87501.

© EVOKE Contemporary. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Francis DiFronzo, At Sunset, Part 4, oil over gouache and watercolor on panel, 30” x 60”.

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