It’s an escape — temporary and illusory but welcome — from the after-Sandy anxieties.
These days all well-meaning arts organizations —bands, choruses and chamber groups, theaters, art spaces, museums, opera companies and dance troupes — are touting themselves as balm for storm-ravaged audiences.
It’s the right thing to do, of course. During the blitz Winston Churchill kept the theaters open in London, knowing that even in a firestorm people are comforted by normalcy, entertainment and inspiration,
Seemingly weightless on the quiet second floor of the museum, “Inner Visions”offers unusual relief. It’s a cosmic immersion, a fantastic journey, a swan dive into an exotic garden.
Yes, it’s unreal, for the most part. Rutkin reports to a world of his own, a luminous plane that apparently has water and oxygen and the means of sustaining life.
But there are things we recognize. We see (or we think we see) seed pods and buds, teardrops made of white porcelain, atmospheric conditions, solar storms and cloudscapes. Or are we trekking inside microscopic places, into physical beings. Are we observing secretions, cell-divisions and conceptions?
As a painter, draughtsman and printmaker, Rutkin has a distinct vocabulary coupled with a traditional approach. The surfaces of the paintings, which are almost always on paper, are elaborately layered with underpaintings and glazes. Some seem almost backlit and there’s opalescence everywhere.
Speaking of vocabulary, Rutkin likes titles that offer interpretive clues. The small oil-on-paper (8 by 10 inches) he calls “Suzanne” has a sort of rounded form with some attentive red, snake-like entities. Are we looking at a kind of abstract “Susanna and the Elders” situation, where an innocent entity is being subjected to unwanted attentions?
Since the show is in the museum’s “Affinities” series, objects from the museum’s collection are being presented alongside Rutkin’s with a text that spells out the interconnections.
Among the inspired juxtapositions, there’s a little box of botanical specimens — seed pods and such — and an eerie little canvas, “Moonlight,” by Ralph Blakelock, whose style resembles that of the mystical painter Albert Ryder. If Rutkin were to paint a semi-realistic night scene, it might look a lot like “Moonlight.”
Two or three other treasures have been brought out the occasion: Albrecht Durer’s small engraving “The Vernicle Held by Two Angels;” Piranesi’s “Le Carceri” and Francisco Goya’s “Si Amanece, Nos Vamos,” one of “Los Caprichosos.”
Curator Robert Bunkin’s selection (of about three dozen pieces, nearly all on paper) is comprehensive and balanced. In the gallery, dreamy, gauzy painted compositions balanced by black-and-white prints and graphite drawings of forms.
the drawings and prints will remind viewers of lithographs by Seurat and Odile Redon, and one or two early modern artists.
Rutkin is not so abstract as some of his fan club seem to think. In the real world, he’s half of the New Brighton design atelier Four Hands Studio. On the side, he and his partner Sage Reynolds have a greenhouse and do some extremely sophisticated propagating/gardening.
Many botanical/organic forms drift through “Inner Visions” as leaves and buds, seeds and fruit, not actual specimens, but perfect templates. It’s the same in the drawings.