Abstract painting is considered non-narrative; story is for realists. But each one of Wilfredo Chiesa’s painterly abstractions at Alpha Gallery offers up a tale. They’re filled with moods, with tensions, with secrets and revelations. Constructed with patience, quiet daring, and cunning attention, they read like Alice Munro short stories.
Chiesa is, and isn’t, a local artist. He is soon to retire as a professor of art at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he has taught since 1980. He was born in Puerto Rico, and has exhibited around the world. But he hasn’t shown much here.
He builds each painting in “Wilfredo Chiesa: White” over a spare armature of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines. Sometimes those lines make crisp borders; sometimes pigment tumbles over them, obscuring them from view.
Chiesa made most of these works just this year, but there’s a distinct delineation between earlier pieces, in which black rises alongside white like a brooding, evil demigod, and later works, in which the artist forsakes black for a chorus of muted colors. Beside these subtler tonal variations, the sharp contrast between black and white is melodramatic and blustery. If you prefer opera to short stories, they may be your cup of tea. There’s a sense of violence, of intrusion, of threat, but it all feels a little ramped up.
But, oh, the white-on-white paintings, inflected with color, grounded with grays, and warmed with yellows, have much to tell. “White No. 4 (Halcyon)” opens to a wedge of gray on the left, which rises with precision from the bottom until white spills over one edge, like the breath on your neck of someone standing too close. Chiesa repeats that wedge shape to the right, in white imbued with other colors — a fall of yellow, a soft splurge of orange. This section seems to blush, to demur, to smile.
Chiesa clearly deliberates about space — we see great dropoffs in the paintings with black; in those without, there’s a sense of fullness or emptiness beneath the surface, sometimes unveiled. The closeness of tones makes for intimacy within the whiter works, and more intrigue.
Two artists deftly conversing
There’s more white across the street at Barbara Krakow Gallery, in a deft and surprising pairing of works by Robert Ryman and Sylvia Plimack Mangold. Ryman, a minimalist, collects Plimack Mangold, best known for her landscapes and interiors. Their works converse in their attention to what materials (paper, ink, pastels) express, and a sense of a constantly changeable and responsive surface.
Plimack Mangold’s “Untitled #1” pastel from 1984, a skyscape with a low fringe of land and bare trees at the bottom, is deep and moody, flecked and layered with gray and blue; she draws a trompe l’oeil border of masking tape around it, reminding us this is no sky, but her own fiction, flat on the page.
It hangs beside Ryman’s clarion suite, “Four Aquatints and One Etching.” Each features a square in the same titanium white. Two are printed on handmade paper with deckled edges, and three on paper with cut edges. Ryman uses etching and aquatint in different formulas in each. In some he adds an overcoat of white. Although they’re all, essentially, white-on-white, they’re more like siblings than quintuplets — kin, but each sharply unique.
Ryman and Plimack Mangold lucidly employ the picture plane; hers (on paper with a deckled edge, it should be noted) describes depth, and his, myriad surfaces. Yet in the end, both address the many actions that occur on a paper’s surface to evoke subtle shifts and differences, and indeed the paper’s role itself.
Reflections and shadows
It’s a treat, on a chilly December day, to step into Richard Raiselis’s tangy, shimmying painting show at Gallery NAGA. Raiselis paints from the 15th floor of a building overlooking Dewey Square. Even his straightforward cityscapes (“Greenway at Gridley Street”) feature reflections that float in his window. Many distort the city through mirrors of glass buildings.
These require close looking, depicting layers of reflection and shadow. In “Financial Center,” buildings jiggle like belly dancers. In the reflections of a closer building, we can see the tiny mirror image of the painter at his canvas, amid woozy plates of green and slashes of light. Keep looking, and you’ll see a dark halo around him, which is in fact the shadow he casts on the window he looks out of.
Raiselis paints exactly what he sees, but what he sees swims and flickers in a hall of glass and mirrors. The results are warm, vertiginous, and scrupulously real.
Alternative spaces closing
Two of the area’s strong alternative spaces, Lincoln Arts Project in Waltham and Hallway Gallery in Jamaica Plain, are closing this month — a loss to local artists and audiences. Pat Falco, cofounder of Lincoln Arts Project and Brent Refsland, Hallway’s owner, both say it’s time to move on. Falco’s career as an artist has taken off since Lincoln Arts Project opened in 2011, and he will continue to oversee the Distillery Gallery in South Boston. After six years at Hallway, Refsland says he will focus on Room 68 Provincetown, a design store he opened last summer, where he intends to exhibit New England artists.
More information:
WILFREDO CHIESA: White
At: Alpha Gallery, 37 Newbury St., through Jan. 3. 617-536-4465, www.alphagallery.com
SYLVIA PLIMACK MANGOLD and ROBERT RYMAN
At: Barbara Krakow Gallery, 38 Newbury St., through Jan. 24. 617-262-4490, www.barbarakrakow gallery.com
RICHARD RAISELIS: Time for Reflection
At: Gallery NAGA, 67 Newbury St., through Dec. 20. 617-267-9060, www.gallerynaga.com
Cate McQuaid can be reached at catemcquaid@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @cmcq.