Riva Lehrer: Circle Stories
Chicago Cultural Center
78 East Washington Street
Chicago, IL 60602
(312) 744-6630
March 27 - May 30, 2004
By DIANE
THODOS
Riva Lehrer Circle
Story #10: Eli Clare 2003
acryllic on panel, 29 x 37 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Susan A. Gescheidle
The paintings in Riva Lehrer's
exhibit Circle Stories include overtly personal and political themes.
The catalog essay describes Lehrer, a Chicago painter for over 20 years,
as a person who has lived with a condition known as spina bifida since
birth and has had to endure scores of operations over the years. Her
transformation into an artist who combined personal and activist content
began when she came to Chicago in 1980 and saw the work of artists like
Judy Chicago and Hollis Sigler. The emergence of the Circle Stories
series began when she joined a disabled artists group in 1997. As the
artist recounted in "Pink Pages" (Spring 2004): "My entire
life changed...I met all these really amazing people. It is one of those
things when you learn that you don't know how badly you need something
until all of a sudden it is there." The portraits in this exhibit
serve as homage to the achievements and spirit of the people in this
group.
Each image portrays the subject in a setting of their choice that is
occasionally realistic, but more often imagined. Their professions vary
widely;a fellow painter, a dancer/choreographer, an actress/playwright,
a theater teacher, a political activist, a performance artist, a Fulbright
scholar/psychologist, and a poet. Several of her subjects are "little
people" (the preferred designation within the disability community
for people formerly referred to as dwarfs), while some are in wheelchairs
or on crutches. At times the portraits do not definitively reveal what
the subject's disability is without referring to written material.
The intensity of Lehrer's technique, with its crisply observed realism
mixed with fantastically contrived settings, has a peculiar surrealistic
quality with Magic Realist undertones. The name Magic Realism was originally
coined by the German critic Franz Roh in 1925 and is most prevalent
today in Latin American art and writing. Improbable and fantastical
elements are combined with realistic elements, deeply embedding the
two opposite and contradictory forces. Fantasy is used to escape deep
and intolerable oppression, as a means of psychological survival but
also as a way to surrealistically express and transform the emotional
meaning of suffering. The "magic" in these paintings does
not provide the excuse for arbitrary transformations but has an allegorical
purpose. In America several important artists such as George Tooker,
who worked during the Great Depression, used Magic Realism to comment
on social and economic inequality and prejudice. Lehrer's work is part
of this tradition along with contemporary American artists Vincent Disiderio,
James Valerio, and John Sebraw.
Each portrait expresses a particular mood. Lehrer uses Magic Realism
to transmit a sense of darkness and pain as well as a will to find metaphysical
relief in an imagined world. There is something frightening about the
pitch darkness that envelopes the subject Tekki Lomnikki, who is sharply
lit from the side and stepping on a floor littered with paper doll cutout
clothes. There are stalactites that look like fangs in the cave-like
background in Hollis Sigler's portrait. The picture of the little person
Rebecca Maskos (she is a victim of Osteogenesis Imperfecta) sitting
on a wall with a bare winter tree behind her that entraps a blue jay
is also stark. But the subject has a penetrating expression emanating
from her face as she points to the palm of her hand. She is a symbolic
figure, a harbinger of fate bearing a question.
Other works lie on the opposite side of the emotional spectrum and move
towards healing or release. The portrait of William Shannon standing
on his crutches as he reaches for some invisible presence that seems
to move in the shimmering shadows next to him is mysterious and touching.
This image is a sign of entry into another world. The most powerful
painting in the show is the portrait of Eli Claire which depicts the
artist in symbolic communion with a densely lust forest landscape. Here
Lehrer is at her most memorable. Every leaf, branch, flower, and ripple
of water is so intensely observed that one cannot help feeling the condensation
of time in looking at the scene. This painting is moving because in
it, nature and its tremendously powerful presence resolves the balance
between pain and existence while affirming a wondrously regenerative
meaning to life.
Diane Thodos is an artist
and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. She is represented by
the Paule Friedland and Alexandre Rivault Gallery in Paris.
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