Susan Erony at Trident Gallery
Lost in America
By: Trident - Oct 21, 2018
Lost in America
By Susan Erony
Trident Gallery
189 Main Street
Gloucester, Mass.
Opening Saturday, October 27, 5 to 7PM.
Characteristically, Susan Erony employs conventional art materials, especially acrylic, in unfamiliar ways that render them strange, and she employs unconventional materials having conceptual or personal significance.
And characteristically, her new work engages history and manifests a deep ethical consciousness. The abstract paintings and those having general subjects (such as the pair reproduced in this invitation) bear strong emotions in their organic textures and make specific engagements with their titles. Other paintings gesture to the universal through the intimate specificity of the subject or the artist’s materials: in Lost in America, you will encounter Tycho Brahe’s silver nose, a section of lace sewn by the artist’s grandmother, the words of Margaret Fuller, and fragments of the clothing and journal of the artist’s friend who died by his own hand.
Visual beauty is both a refuge from the trials of life and a visceral demand for the mind’s attention. In Susan Erony’s art, beauty mediates the opposed imperatives of emotional safety and moral awareness: her work submits to the seduction of beauty, even as it compels us, in that safe embrace, to remain mindful of the suffering which gives love its importance and beauty its splendor.