Continuing through May 8, 2025
The conceptual photographs of Cara Barer and the abstract paintings of Piero Spadaro form the two-person show titled “Destination.” The pairing makes for a study in apparent contrasts as well as a marriage of complementaries: opposites attract, after all. The old aesthetic concept of art as a finished, polished object of contemplation, a destination, so to speak, resurfaces in these authoritative paintings and photographs. Also operant is the contemporary notion of art as the by-product or end result of a process: as the residuum/evidence of an experiment, unplanned or planned only in general terms.
Barer sees her artistic repurposing of old books as lending them a second life (as art objects) that will survive the obsolescence of the information they contain, for example a Windows 95 manual. For the most part the information, due to the artist’s dissections and reassemblies, including soakings in dye baths, is illegible. Out of date as they are, the point is to see the object, not to read its content.
Her photographic arrangements of rumpled pages are transformed into floral blooms. To some they might transcend biological and botanical metaphors to suggest religious icons or mandalas, and, with their radiant colors set against black backgrounds, the stained-glass windows of Gothic cathedrals, themselves paradoxically weathered symbols of the eternal and ineffable. Barer’s newest photographs, mounted on plexiglas, focus on maps and travel books, which embody “exploration and impermanence.” The geographic and historical associations of place names that remain still legible in “San Francisco,” “ Altiplano,” “Tierra del Fuego,” and the sardonically titled “Carving Up the World,” referring to the Great Powers’ colonial adventures of past and present, lend these abstractions an elegiac note: The blue planet floating in blackness has become an accordion-folded pressed flower.
While Barer finds poetry and a strange majesty in printed ephemera, Spadaro constructs semi-abstract assemblages that conjure up Romantic landscapes that invoke the Age of Exploration, minus its contemporary sociopolitical black eye. Imagine if polar and tropical expeditions had enlisted abstract painters instead of water-colorists and glass-plate photographers. Spadaro is able to combine the most heterogeneous materials — acrylic, glitter, colored and textured art papers, powdered pigments, including ultraviolet-sensitive colors, and hard, clear resin — into, in his words, “topographical maps that flow over the panels’ surfaces.”
His fascination with reflective materials in which he seals his landscapes, like small creatures in amber, is verbally reinforced by his marine-mystique titles. “Gleaming,” “Charting,” and “Green Flash” are all named after an optical phenomenon occurring at sunrise and sunset under specific atmospheric conditions. Spadaro connects scientific exploration and observation with, to revive a now somewhat archaic term, the pursuit of the Absolute.
The double readings of these paintings, somewhere in the middle between painterly collage/abstraction and visionary landscape, lend them infinite associations. We look both at them and into them.
