The Ladder Gallery in The New Providence Community Center is presenting work by the painter Mark Redgrave. Billed in the exhibition invitation as both artist and art therapist, one cannot help but make a link between the duplicity of the exhibition and that of Redgrave himself. The content of the exhibition, ‘Jazz et al’, which consists of recent paintings by the artist, is conveniently split into two visual categories. One half, as the title suggests, is primarily focused on Jazz and depicts various brightly colored images of musicians with their instruments in musical form, reminiscent of the jazz studies done by artist Maxwell Taylor in the mid-90’s. The ‘et al‘ portion of the exhibition is more complex with imagery heavy in metaphor and often with strange undeterminable narratives.
This is perhaps best illustrated with the piece ‘The Death Of Spiderman’, a large square panel depicting what seems to be a ballet scene where two male dancers are carrying off a third figure wearing a Spiderman mask. With no discernable background in the painting the context of the figures or the cause of death are unclear and the viewer is left only to decipher the uneasy feeling of seeing a dead super hero, who of course are not meant to die, being carried off.
Other works create similar feelings of awkward uneasiness such as ‘Love and Death’ with its odd juxtapositions of dancing and kissing figures anchored by a series of skulls. As well as the Francis Bacon inspired ‘The Helping Hand’, and ‘Homage to Ted Hughes’ a series of ten digitally manipulated images honoring the late poet filled with text and contorted facial expression (presumably the artist). There are also the two diptychs ‘Primitives I and II’ which almost seem like alien portraits with their odd peaked heads and bulbous eyes and which, perhaps indirectly, reference the wonderful pair of paintings ‘Untitled I and II’ shown at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas last year.
