Dmitri Cavander at MPG Contemporary
Views of San Francisco
By: Shawn Hill - Apr 06, 2008
Paintings by Dmitri Cavander
April 4-26, 2008
MPG Contemporary
450 Harrison Ave., Suite 55
Boston, MA 02118
http://www.mpgallery.net
Dmitri Cavander's new show of square-shaped canvases (most 24") brings a fresh, if familiar flavor to Boston. Formerly of Somerville, the painter now resides in San Francisco, and these lush and colorful oils are all vistas of that beloved and dramatic city. Vertical streets, tightly packed architecture, sudden drops and long slanting shadows are familiar symbols of the city by the bay. Cavander's panoramic vision and focus on roads and streets as conduits for human motion allows him to interpret the familiar with his own spin.
Cavander's work has been compared to Fairfield Porter's in the past, and like Porter he is a gestural realist who lets the paint remain paint, but depicts what he sees with fluid marks. Unlike Porter he seldom seems to see figures. His interiors and still lives of the past have given away on the West Coast to urban vistas, ones that are full of life but curiously devoid of actual human figures. In fact everything he depicts refers indirectly to the human presence. While not quite photographic, his solid compositions are convincing concerning space and the interaction of natural color.
"Divisadero and Pacific" is punctuated by the brilliant red of a call box on a street corner. Behind it a sheer drop leads ultimately to sea of blue sky. The colors of the rest of the painting are more muted, browns and grays and blues, but they all seem to capture that dawn-time moment when a ray of sunlight can flare a red sign up into a lick of flame in a sleepy world.
"Tree in Early Morning" also captures a splash of sunlight, across the yellow surface of a stuccoed modernist house. The tree that casts the bluish shadows across the rest of the façade is out of the frame, its reflected branches tendrils of windswept color that echo the reach of a smaller fir tree somewhere in the house's back yard. The composition is intriguing: at the center is the edge of the house. To the left it is cropped by the edge of the canvas. To the right is empty space, all still in shadow, the yard untouched by the rising sun as yet. Cavander picks a moment of transition, a liminal region within the scene as its anchor. There's a sense of movement in this still shot, not within it by suggested by the position of the viewer. It's like an eye raking its vision across a much wider panorama.
The endless unfolding of scenes is a subject Cavander has often approached in the past with his highway paintings. These are images of driving composed as if from the driver's seat. The California version of this theme appears in "Route 1 Near Pacifica," where a curving road recedes into the distance, towards a gently rolling hill, past regions of light and shade that promise interesting vistas to come. The other cars on the road are little squares of metallic color, a requisite part of a built environment that merges seamlessly with the natural world.
Of course there must be a vision of San Francisco on other than a sunny day, and "Fog, Early Morning, Noe Valley" fits the bill. Here a settling of houses, all at diagonals to the canvas, crowd in muted pastels at the bottom of the canvas. They grow indistinct as the eye moves up, into a sea of murky grays, with tiny highlights of yellow illumination sparkling through the mist. The watery, blurred landscape here recalls some of Whistler's impressionistic symphonies of paint.
Much more solid and earthbound is "Laundromat Waiting Area," where the flat plastic colors of hard quasi-modernist chairs suggest a human presence in a shadowy, glass-walled room. Through the big industrial panes, the sunlit city unfolds, awaiting a human-sized urban lifestyle that feels European and sophisticated, just momentarily empty of visible inhabitants.