NEVADOMI: Dancing on the Moon by wolfsgallery

NEVADOMI

DANCING ON THE MOON WOLFS Gallery, Cleveland, Ohio October 14 - December 23, 2021

NEVADOMI DANCING ON THE MOON WOLFS Gallery, Cleveland, Ohio October 14 - December 23, 2021 With essays by Douglas Max Utter & George Mauersberger

23645 Mercantile Road | Beachwood, Ohio 44122 | 216-721-6945 | www.wolfsgallery.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 08 Reacting to Nevadomi’s Persephone Cycle by Doug Utter 14 NEVADOMI by George Mauersberger 20 Catalog 23

INTRODUCTION Michael Wolf

“Dancing on the Moon” will be the first in an ongoing series of exhibitions at WOLFS that will showcase the numerous and compelling chapters of Ken Nevadomi’s career. With few exceptions, the paintings in this exhibition have been locked away for decades, many coming directly from the artist’s studio. Dating from roughly 1986 to 1993, the paintings represent a mature phase of Nevadomi’s career, when the artist reassessed his direction, and chose to confront, head-on, one of his greatest heroes and inspirations: Pablo Picasso. He admired this “giant” for most of his life, having spent hours in front of Picasso’s majestic Blue Period masterpiece, La Vie, in the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art. A blue palette and classicizing nudes populate many of these canvases which are set in otherworldly terrains. Another hallmark of this period of Nevadomi’s production is his new technical experimentation with gritty paint additives such as sand and plaster which he used to evoke stone and the vacuous shores in these work’s mysterious landscapes. Important to this region as a major artist and highly-regarded art professor at Cleveland State University, Ken Nevadomi (b. 1939) owned his blue-collar roots fully, a persona that adds another dimension to his appeal and informs his imagery. At the age of 17, Nevadomi left his troubled home in Cleveland, enlisting in the service for two tours of duty. During this time, he began to recognize his talent for drawing, drew extensively from life, and hungered to learn how to paint. Once he got out, he sought academic art training and earned his B.F.A. from the Columbus College of Art and Design in 1972 and an M.F.A. from Kent State University in 1975. From that point on, he never stopped painting, treating his vocation as a second full-time job in addition to his teaching. His productivity was staggering, and the effort reaped recognition. Nevadomi has appeared in over 40 juried shows and at least sixteen one-man shows since 1975, and he has won three individual artist grants from the Ohio Arts Council. His work was regularly included in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s May Shows winning several first prizes in painting. He was awarded the 1988 Cleveland Arts Prize for Visual Arts. Despite all these successes, he never had representation in New York, where, for better or worse, so many important artistic careers are made.

This changed for Nevadomi in early september of this year when WOLFS, in collaboration with Maxwell Wolf of New Canons, mounted TUBE STRANGE, Nevadomi’s long overdue New York debut exhibition, alongside a critically acclaimed presentation of selected works at The Independent, the city’s premier annual contemporary art fair. As Andy Battaglia of Artnews opined, Ken’s “paintings...are entrancing and enigmatic, in an array of styles that are hard to reconcile as the work of only one artist. The elusive but evocative subject matter drifts between strange fever-dream visions and sly allusions to the artist’s past as a commercial illustrator.” For Max Lakin of Artforum to proclaim Ken’s “berserk neo Expressionist paintings and drawings, easily the best thing [he] saw” throughout the melee of Armory week, it’s clear that although delayed, Nevadomi’s New York arrival is finally affirmed. Nevadomi’s body of work, a rich trove of large-scale paintings and drawings chart a prolific career spent probing important, provocative subjects that span the twilight of the Industrial Age and the dawn of the Information Age. Continuing to present Nevadomi’s brilliant take on this volatile time is a challenge we enthusiastically embrace.

“The images I paint come from things I have a feeling for or an interest in. The comedy and tragedy of life. Beauty, ugliness. A sense that something has happened or is going to happen. The energy that we put into our lives – from the torture and death that humans inflict on each other consistently and in a thousand ways, to the beauty of movements in a dance, to robbing banks, to the extent people will go to have their pleasures and pain – is, to me, incredible and awesome. I love to paint, maybe I even live to paint. Some Freudian might say I’m anal compulsive. Fuck ‘em. I like it anyway. It’s like getting out of one mind and into another. It’s every bit as exciting to me as getting into a rocket and blasting off to points unknown. It’s probably as close as I’ll ever get to knowing real freedom.” - Ken Nevadomi 13

REACTING TO NEVADOMI’S PERSEPHONE CYCLE Douglas Max Utter

Noted for chameleon-like changes in painterly manners and subject matter during a career spanning five decades, Cleveland born neoexpressionist artist Ken Nevadomi has often returned to age-old cultural sources for his strongest imagery. The exhibit Dancing on the Moon showcases works produced by Nevadomi from 1989-93, which include many of the painter’s large and small-scale compositions inspired by Greek mythology. Nevadomi is an unusually productive artist, and in this period of his life when he was in his late forties and early fifties, he outdid himself. Dozens of works which even now rarely have been seen or published, crowded from his imagination onto paper and canvas at his studio in Cleveland State University’s old art building on Chester Avenue. After three or four years of such late-night reckonings with pre-Hellenic archetypes there were enough eerie, poetically enthralling images to fill several large galleries. And surely the alternately semi-vernacular or elegantly mannerist Nevadomi is one of the very few painters since antiquity to obsess with convincing sibylline power about the one myth in particular which is wellrepresented at Dancing on the Moon. That myth is the backbone of the Eleusinian mysteries, the saga of Demeter, Persephone, and Hades in which the goddess of the earth loses her daughter to the ultimate dark force, the king of the underworld. Originally an origin-story focused on the cycle of Earth’s seasons, it resonates today both as a tabloidesque tale of loss, abduction, and violation (among the “royals” of the ancient pantheon), and also with urgent macrocosmic concerns. Nevadomi’s slender nude figures, enacting their struggle against the sun-bleached, impasto-scraped expanses of the artist’s rendering of the Mediterranean world, supplanted by the brimstone-blasted walls of Hell itself, readily evoke the fast approaching dangers of environmental carnage and climate change. Hubris – the overweening pride that leads to downfall and disaster – is another Greek theme that Nevadomi seems to approach in these works. Working on grand, Transavantgarde-style canvases measuring nearly seven-feet tall, or at other times using quite elegant folio or quarto heavy wove papers rubbed with charcoal or lightly slathered with paint, Nevadomi depicted long-limbed androgynous young women -- or perhaps just one, clothed and nude, from the back or from above. Whether she was based on any actual person, she seems almost doll-like, erotic maybe, though in a strangely abstract way. Her kabuki-like featurelessness conveys the inner dramatic force of an ideal human form. These drawings of Persephone (the figure matches the persona and is from the same period of activity as the

larger, myth-specific compositions) are dancer-like or resemble an acrobat (one is actually titled Acrobat and is a bit like Picasso’s Rose period circus performers). Her poses are stiffly geometric, stretching from a central position in the midst of an actual circle; as if her arms and legs were the hands of a clock. One of the largest compositions in this series is a five-foot square canvas titled, “Instruction of a Certain Kind,” from 1981. A woman on the left, dressed in a floor-length, pleated skirt (clutched from behind by a familiar-like animal, a cat or a monkey), holds the girl’s outstretched ankle steady as she executes a handstand. The teacher and her student are placed in a circle of what might be pounded moondust. In other works this rough yet subtly textured background “noise” recurs in different materials and strengths as a rendering of stone or ground. In many paintings it almost hurts the eyes, convincingly portraying the dry, dusty and hot properties of a place of spiritual exile -- as heartless as concrete. This is the paving substance of Nevadomi’s Hades, which can also double as the complex but featureless, disturbed yet quiet surface of the moon. At the horizon beyond their figures begins a thick, rough infinite black. Psychologically this painting does indeed seem like one of the ancient mysteries, which we know a little bit about (from an artistic point of view) from the murals preserved in the Villa of Mysteries at Pompeii. It also is reminiscent of Attic black or red ground ceramic vessels of the classical er. It glows with a sense of lost harmonies and hidden accord. Three of the most powerful paintings on view depict principal events in the Persephone-Demeter cycle. The first shows Persephone, nude, white, all but faceless, clutched by Hades who is rendered in browns and black. They ride a black horse, up from a long curve of beach and ocean, toward the viewer. It’s as if we stand at an entrance to the underworld high above the shore and a river winding toward it, on the side of a mountain. She struggles as he holds her in front of him on the horse’s shoulders, as her long hair uncoils in the wind. We can’t quite see their faces, but we can imagine them. It’s a dramatic, cinematic arrangement of events and motion, with a dark arch on the right that is the destination of Hades and his victim. There is something of Delacroix in the thunderous quiet of the scene. It’s like an overture, rushing toward the expository dramatic events that will follow. A larger painting shows Persephone in the Underworld. As in other images, she is tall and thin, and here she is still a pale ocher shade – in later painted episodes Nevadomi shows the dreadful trauma of her months in below ground, naked skin turned to a patchwork of painful ash.

But here at the beginning she stands before Pluto/Hades with limbs and torso and neck slightly bent in cautious stillness. Later – in the large canvas “Woman Visited by God and several more, she might be remembering another incarnation, or another myth, of the Egyptian Isis being interviewed by Horus, or by Set, where she is as motionless as Lot’s wife (another Nevadomi subject), turned toward to salt by the wrath of Jehovah. There she could be vitrified, hardened to brittle spiritual glass by the fires of the dark god. But in this first painting of life in Hell only Hades is burnt, standing with one leg forward like an Egyptian god or king, his ovate, fish-shaped eye in profile. His head is enormous compared to hers, and he is bulkier, taller. Further increasing his height and augmenting his power is an animal skin, worn over the top of his head and down his back -- the Golden Fleece or the hide of the Minotaur. He reaches to Persephone’s mouth and places between her lips a pomegranate seed; if she eats it (and she will), she will be doomed to spend three months of the year away from her mother, in a terrible place of rock and darkness and fire, which Nevadomi paints so well in succeeding works in the series... Another painting depicts the reunion of Demeter and Persephone at the (temporary) end of her ordeal. But the work that remains in my memory most vividly is another that claims Persephone in its title. from this cycle. It’s quite large, around 7 by 6 feet, and fits together like a well-written sonnet. In it the young goddess is leaning against a tree, her head and eyes are turned downward a little, but not in pain, more in shyness. She is very young, a child, she leans on her arms and extends her legs slanting toward the left, stretching and at ease. Farther over beyond another tree we see a young man. He seems to be reaching forward, away from the viewer into some bushes – so we see only the blond muscles of his back. Is this really Persephone and Hades? More like Daphnis and Chloe, or even Adam and Eve in a prelapsarian moment of pure delight. That Nevadomi can paint such warmth and quiet joy as well as the hot and cold running horrors of Hell, is a convincing testament to the powers of both the painter and the broad compass of his art.

NEVADOMI George Mauersberger

Ken Nevadomi has been my friend, colleague, and mentor for over thirty years. We worked together for many years in the Cleveland State University Art Department. We used to share a studio downtown. Having observed his work habits, I learned about his dedication and disciplined sense of professionalism. I also learned about his sense of humor, his kindness, and his humanity. I make no pretense to being objective. Before coming to CSU as a Professor of Painting, Ken had important experiences that I believe informed his art and his outlook. As a veteran of the military, he traveled extensively abroad, serving his country in both the Army and the Air Force. After leaving the service, he worked at American Greetings in Cleveland, designing greeting cards with an unlikely colleague, Robert Crumb, who went on to fame as one of the founders of the underground comix movement. Like Crumb, and his late lamented collaborator, Harvey Pekar, Nevadomi shares a passion for jazz music. I see the influence of modern jazz on Nevadomi’s work, particularly in the improvisational way he works with images, creating unlikely and contrasting combinations to ponder. While one can see numerous art historical influences and references in his work, such as Picasso, Dali, de Chirico, Beckman, etc., I speculate that movies also play an important role in the way he thinks about his work. The depictions of movement, of various angles, repetitions...they seem to be cinematic, and concerned with the element of time, of taking it apart and putting it back together. Also, he is primarily, but not exclusively, a figurative artist. He is operating within an age-old tradition, but trying to push it further. Clearly, in addition to influences, there is a unique voice and sensibility at work. His work reveals his complex view of the world with depictions of absurdity, tragedy, beauty, repulsiveness, joy and pain.

While he is famously “tight-lipped” about the meaning of his work, that should not imply that he doesn’t think long and hard about it, or that the images are simply vehicles for throwing paint around. But ultimately, Nevadomi is a visual artist. He lives in the world of art much as a writer lives in the world of books. Our late colleague Marvin Jones

once commented, “Drawing is thinking.” To me, Ken is the epitome of a visual thinker, clearly understanding the notion of a visual language. When I look at Ken Nevadomi’s work, I see swirling, complex visual thoughts and absurd allusions, figures that defy gravity, and images that bounce back and forth and make my eyes and mind spin as I try to take it all in. - George Mauersberger

Dancer with Parrot 1985 Acrylic on paper Signed, dated and titled verso 27 x 20 inches

Nude 1988 Acrylic on paper Signed, dated and titled verso 30 x 22 inches

Variation on the Myth of Persephone 1988 Acrylic on paper Signed, dated and titled verso 30 x 22 inches

White Head 1989 Acrylic on paper Signed, dated and titled verso 43 x 38.5 inches

Man and Woman/Lovers 1989 Acrylic on paper Signed, dated and titled verso 30 x 22 inches

Water Devil 1989 Acrylic on paper Signed, dated and titled verso 30 x 22 inches

Lightning Devil 1989 Acrylic on paper Signed, dated and titled verso 30 x 22 inches

Woman with Moon 1989-91 Acrylic on paper Signed, dated and titled verso 30 x 22 inches

Dog Alley 1989 Acrylic on paper Signed, dated and titled verso 22 x 30 inches

Woman Visited by God 1989 Acrylic on canvas Signed, dated and titled verso 61 x 47 inches

Instruction of a Certian Kind 1989 Acrylic on canvas Signed, dated and titled verso 63 x 60 inches

Untitled Pofile c. 1990 Acrylic on canvas 24.5 x 20.5 inches

Nude c. 1990 Acrylic on canvas 26 x 11.5 inches

Still Life c. 1900 Acrylic on canvas 14 x 18 inches

Man of Heart 1990 Acrylic on paper Signed, dated and titled verso 22 x 30 inches

Dancer in Circle (IV) 1990 Acrylic on paper Signed and dated lower right, titled lower left 22 x 30 inches

The Acrobat c 1990 Acrylic on paper Signed dated and titled verso 30 x 22 inches

Variation on the Myth of Persephone 1990 Acrylic on canvas Signed dated and titled verso 80 x 80 inches

Variation on the Myth of Persephone (with Tree) 1990 Acrylic on canvas Signed dated and titled verso 74 x 59 inches

Return of the Sailors (Lost at Sea) 1991 Acrylic on canvas Signed dated and titled verso 60 x 66 inches

Dancing on the Moon (Night) 1991 Acrylic on canvas Signed dated and titled verso 52 x 68 inches

Projected Dog 1992 Acrylic on canvas 17.5 x 17.5 inches

Ethereal Visitor 1992 Acrylic on canvas Signed dated and titled verso 54 x 66 inches

Runaway Horse 1992 Acrylic on canvas Signed dated and titled verso 54 x 64 inches

Artist Paints a Burning Continent 1992 Acrylic on canvas Signed dated and titled verso 53 x 80.5 inches

Fishing w/ Picasso 1991 Acrylic on canvas Signed dated and titled verso 36 x 31 inches

Bull’s Head 1993 Acrylic on canvas Signed, dated and titled verso 30 x 22 inches

Moon in Labyrinth 1993 Acrylic on canvas Signed dated and titled verso 45 x 54 inches

Lot’s Wife (w/ Flower Heads) 1993 Acrylic on canvas Signed dated and titled verso 65 x 65 inches

Lot’s Wife 1993 Acrylic on canvas Signed dated and titled verso 66 x 54 inches

Lolita and the Giants 1993 Acrylic on canvas Signed dated and titled verso 44 x 58 inches

Untitled c 1993 Acrylic on canvas 41 x 27.5 inches

Boy with Birds in His Head 1993 Acrylic on paper Signed, dated and titled lower right 30 x 22 inches

Sleeping Head 1993 Acrylic on canvas Signed dated and titled verso 43.5 x 53 inches

Woman with Pearls 1993 Acrylic on canvas Signed dated and titled verso 44 x 33.5 inches

Untitled (Asian Woman) 1994-1998 Acrylic on canvas Signed, dated and titled verso 49.5 x 55 inches

Woman with Kimono 1995 Acrylic on canvas Signed dated and titled verso 43 x 36 inches

23645 Mercantile Road | Beachwood, Ohio 44122 | 216-721-6945 | www.wolfsgallery.com