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Queen City Gallery: NY Underground Scene 1972 - 1977

by J. Tim Raymond
The eyes tell their stories. Eyes streaked with mascara, fogged and hollow with drug use, obscured by dark glasses—eyes leaden, lidded, vacant, searching, clenched and pleased. Faces too, rouged, painted and masked. Faces that stare from a soundless stage, improbably captured in Polaroids and snapshots from a Brownie by the kid brother of a band member who just hung around the group’s gigs and took pictures.

Art Dialogue: The Brothers Show

by J. Tim Raymond
Two artists are exhibiting their work together for the first time at the same gallery, the Art Dialogue Gallery here in Buffalo. The fact that the two artists are brothers to each other makes this show singularly interesting. The precise, elegant still-life paintings of Thomas and Kevin Kegler’s work probes ephemeral solutions in hardware assemblage. In these dual presentations, a viewer may sense an aesthetic version of the hunter/gatherer clan. Historically about half the great art generated by mankind is dedicated to the accurate transcription of the sensible world. Perhaps the modern amendment to this striving for the mastery of nature by convincing imitation is to address the problem of maintaining the intensity of the painting while getting at some kind of truth between the known fact and the dextrous use of tools in pursuing the artist’s aims. Thomas Kegler works his pursuit in rich densities of silver-grey and hues of sienna sinuously painted on linen. The frames especially are suffused in antique patinas of lustrous brown contrasting handsomely with the nature morte subject matter —mostly items one would find on a Hepplewhite sideboard circa 1870: eggs on a plate, orange peels on a plate, grapes, and wilting flowers on a fine lace tablecloth. These are traditional subjects presented in satisfying arrangements, often with a Rembrandtian glissado of white, depicting the lived experience of space and the objects in it with characteristically memetic force.



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