Windows on the world: Allan Gorman in the city

Pity poor paper. It really wants to be glass. Ditto for canvas. It isn’t glass, either, and it rankles at its own opacity. Sometimes it feels like the entire reason painters add brilliant pigment to panels is to help stiff surfaces achieve the peaceable qualities of a windowpane. Glass doesn’t fight the light. It acquiesces to its demands for penetration. Glass lets the illumination in, and when it does, it amplifies its brilliant shine.

But painters are illusionists, not alchemists. Any windows that they open are in our minds. In “Color, Inside and Outside the Lines,” Prof. Beatrice Mady of the Fine Arts Gallery at St. Peter’s University (47 Glenwood Ave.) pairs Bryant Small and Allan Gorman, summoners of imaginary photons. Neither one has managed to transmute paper and canvas into glass — no Lite Brite bulb shines behind their frames — but they’ve bestowed an unusual translucency to their urban studies anyway.

To those who’ve followed his work, Gorman is more associated with things concrete than things transparent. But even appreciators of his post-industrial cityscapes and images of steely underbridge anomalies have noticed that he’s just as interested in the way in which light passes through girders as he is with the girders themselves. His prior shows have been busy with shadows and sun. For “Color, Inside and Outside the Lines,” he’s removed the realistic representations of tenements, bricks, and stairwells but left the play of illumination in place. He’s also changed his favored hues, switching from institutional greens and rust orange-brown to the colors of the urban undertone: pale yellow, daybreak pink, the light blue of the apartment skylight. Looking at his recent paintings feel a little like catching a glimpse of the code behind a 3-D computer simulation. If you’re familiar with what he does, the St. Peter’s show is a trip.

It’s even a trip if you’ve never heard of him. His recent canvases are full of childlike joy about what light can do: the way it radiates and bends over barriers, refracts, mixes colors, and alternately sorts, blends, and elevates objects in its path. It’s hard not to get swept up in his enthusiasm. “Through the Looking Glass,” an oil painting on a square panel, might remind you of an empty storefront window of a shop, or a revolving door, or a ticket-taker’s booth. Gorman’s angles his images of tinted, transparent sheets to draw the eye the past surface lines and into an undefined interior space. This is one of the special property of glass: it promises honesty. It lets us in. We may not know what we’re looking at, but we believe that there’s a space for observation and we’re seeing what there is to see.

Mystery in plain daylight: “Through the Looking Glass”

That same openness — and invitation to stare — is present in a Gorman triptych in which shapes that suggest a building corner on a wraparound sidewalk are visible through floating panes that are given dimension and presence through the inclusion of a black shadow. As we apprehend the colored blocks through the hovering frame, they make immediate sense to us. It’s uncanny, and maybe even a little disturbing, how familiar the scene feels, and how quickly it coheres into a streetscape.

Only someone attuned to the deep code of architecture and the relationship between light and the city could have painted “Metropolis,” with its radiance expressed as long see-through wedges brightening the rows and columns of the built environment. This is the urban core he’s showing us: diagonal lines suggestive of light intersecting with vertical ones suggestive of glass and concrete. It’s not so different from the shadow-play he’s given us in his paintings of specific bridges. It is merely, as he’s put it elsewhere, a different way of seeing.

Find myself a city to live in: Gorman’s “Metropolis.”

As Gorman gets elusive, Bryant Small has become more specific. He’s hung the names of global cities on his dramatic alcohol ink paintings, each with fields of vibrant color, smears, drips, and pressurized streaks that make it look like a squeegee was applied to the paper. “Berlin,” for instance, looks like a nest of long blue-gray thorns atop a nimbus of aqua, pink, and orange. Are we staring down a busy street that’s all angles, sudden illuminations, and brisk activity, or does Small mean to suggest something about the emotional weather in eastern Germany? Probably both. The mesmerizing “London” is  all dazzling color in the background and grey horizontal lines in the foreground that resemble plane-window moisture pulled sideways through the force of acceleration. Visitors to England will surely sympathize. There’s lots to see, but it’s raining out.

Take my breath away: Bryant Small’s “Berlin”

Small is a chromatic maximalist, saturating every inch of his pieces with bright pigment and adding black lines and splatters to make his hot pinks and Caribbean greens all the more intense. Because of its evenness and its tendency to ripple and pool and dry that way, alcohol ink on paper bears an eerie resemblance to stained glass. Sensing an opportunity to take us to church, Small drenches his pieces so thoroughly it’s like he’s dipped them in a rainbow. In “Tokyo,” the most remarkable of his globetrotting series, an icy blue-green surface seems to mask neon lights, headlamps, and a downtown-district glow. It’s like we’re apprehending a streetscape, darkly, through a shattered pane. Cracks are everywhere, but the sheet of glass seems thick and unlikely to budge.

Dream in Shibuya: Small visits (or thinks about) Tokyo

Yet glass — or the impression of glass — will have its way. Even though much in “Tokyo” is obscured, the translucency that Small is able to generate puts us right in the scene. We feel like there are sources of light just beyond our apprehension. Like Gorman, he puts our faith in glass to narrative ends. There’s a city waiting for us on the other side of the window. We can trace its outlines and sense the contours of its architecture and the emotional experience of living there. Slip past the invisible barrier, if only with our eyes, and we can be part of it.

(Although it’s open during St. Peter’s regular hours, the MacMahon Student Center can be tricky to get into. Tell the security guard you’d like to go to the fifth floor to see the art exhibition. Or just wait for a friendly student to let you in.)

Tris McCall regularly writes about visual art (and other topics) for NJArts.net, Jersey City Times, and other independent publications. He’s also written for the Newark Star-Ledger, Jersey Beat, the Jersey City Reporter, the Jersey Journal, the Jersey City Independent, Inside Jersey, and New Jersey dot com. He also writes about things that have no relevance to New Jersey. Not today, though.

Eye Level is an online journal dedicated to visual art in Jersey City, New Jersey. A new review will appear every Tuesday morning at 8 a.m., and there’ll be intermittent commentaries posted to the site in between those reviews.