Crossroads

Opposite: Jay Bailey, Dust Storm in the Petrified Forest, oil on canvas, 40” × 30”. Above, Francis DiFronzo, Where We Are Now (Part 2), oil over gouache and watercolor on panel, 36” × 72”. Below, Jeremy Mann, Composition 179, oil on panel, 48” × 48”.

How do we respond to the world around us? More important, how do artists of our time respond to it? Not just the world we have created—the human world of bustling streets, cell-phone towers, multilane highways, and throngs of people going about their daily lives—but also the world we see beyond this: the permanence behind the fleeting, the physical realm of nature that serves as backdrop and stage to our physical lives.

Fittingly for the turn of the New Year, Evoke Contemporary has curated Crossroads, an exhibition of contemporary landscape painting from three distinctly different voices: perennial gallery favorites Jeremy Mann and Francis DiFronzo, and an invited guest: Jay Bailey. Each artist is working toward a personal vision in his work, and each has been creating that vision through the past few years, when the landscapes of the external world has come to symbolize so much more than we can see on the surface.

Francis DiFronzo is well known for his paintings of the trains, boats, cars, and abandoned hotel signs he finds in the far reaches of the Mojave Desert. A resident of Southern California, DiFronzo travels to this large, expansive space to find unusual relics and objects that seem to be leftovers of past lives. While at first glance one might think that these paintings are about the objects that typically occupy the foreground, for DiFronzo the work is actually about what surrounds them—what’s seen above the horizon.

In DiFronzo’s painting Where Are We Now, Part II, a lone boxcar sits in the middle of the desert, its sliding doors open on both sides to reveal the sprawling cloud shapes seen at sunset in the desert southwest. The boxcar is completed in fine detail, including

Top to bottom: Jay Bailey, The Hard Hand of War, oil on canvas, 20” × 24”. Francis DiFronzo, While Far Off Stars Quiver, Blinking Dire Messages in Code, oil over gouache and watercolor on panel, 30”× 60”. Opposite: Jeremy Mann, Composition 180, oil on panel, 36” × 36”.

its faded Santa Fe Railway logo and weatherworn panels and paint.

For DiFronzo, the painting is really about what surrounds this lonely boxcar. “My paintings are almost like mini-plays, where the landscape is the stage,” he says. “I find that things happen on this stage, and the objects I place in the landscape are like actors, characters, and the stage is the Mojave Desert. My work is always about the land, the temporal things that come and go contrasted with the permanence of the landscape they are found in.”

Jay Bailey paints emotive and expressive landscapes that arise from his memories of Western spaces throughout his lifetime. Also a figurative painter, Bailey found himself drawn to these landscapes after he’d removed himself from them.

“I moved to Texas, but I spent most of my life in northern Nevada,” says Bailey. “I would go out my parents’ front door and see the Sierras right there. Ultimately, I missed home, missed the drama of the landscape, the big storm clouds, the smell of wet sagebrush. And now, revisiting it to me is very lyrical, poetic, and these paintings are my way of communing with those early memories.”

For Bailey, the switch from figuration to landscapes was mainly about knowing that he had permission to do them. The connection between the two genres is something he enjoys exploring. As Bailey explains, it’s not as vast a divide as one might think: “In a landscape painting, the viewer becomes the figure in the space, and that idea is very important to me. I think when you have a figurative painting, the figure creates the narrative, so these paintings are a way to escape the narrative and to focus on clouds, skies, rain, and the way the rain sculpts mountains, desert, and earth.”

Jeremy Mann’s landscapes are in fact cityscapes, completed in an abstracted style that captures the rawness of urban street environments. These paintings, which Mann refers to as his Composition series, were originally part of his master’s thesis, when the painter was exploring the various tools artists use in the creative process.

“I’ve been trying to see how far I can push my control—and noncontrolled marks and representation—in the

images I was making,” says Mann. “Cityscapes are the best for these— grungy, fast, heavy, light, and dark . . . so many elements ripe with the possibility of being put into the right spots in one harmonious composition, once you got over the initial overwhelming amount of information there is when you’re looking at them and trying to figure out where the hell the first mark goes,” Mann says. “So I decided I preferred to try and paint how it ‘feels’ once you’re in it. Soaked it up every day and night, listening to the sounds of a city’s heartbeat, walking around those streets, sometimes in the rain, sometimes with one eye shut, sometimes just standing among the river of people and watching it all go by.”

—Joshua Rose