Celebrating creativity

Visual Art

Nikki Cormaci

Sangria Veritas
Bleecker Street
Sunday, June 4

'North African Dream' by Rodrigo Cardosa

Two visual artists with dynamically contrasting obsessions and experiences brought their art out of the gallery for a one-day show at Bleecker Street Sunday afternoon. Titled Sangria Veritas, in honor of the reserve of $1 Sangrias that tirelessly lubricated the event, the show featured work by Rodrigo Cardoso and Lindsey Davidson.

Cardoso and Davidson were united by Cardoso’s brother, Davidson’s boyfriend, and Bleecker Street regular Pedro Cardoso, a veritable poster child for creative class innovation, whose non-profit media company Motion Color + Sound designed the concept and publicity for Sangria Veritas.

Rodrigo Cardoso’s collection of canvases displayed an impressive diversity of styles and formal structures. Born in Portugal, Cardoso has traveled extensively throughout Africa and South America and his most recent adventures have been in the Amazon. Consequently, his paintings are imbued with an archeological fusion of the sensory materials of indigenous culture and the formal conventions of Surrealism and Cubism.

Cardoso’s formal obsessions appear to be the picture plane and its reconciliation with space. The most aggressive solution to this preoccupation occurred in “Ghost in the Canvas,” a smoky, red painting of amorphous ethereality out of which materialized a vaporous three-dimensional African mask.

By fusing philosophical ideas of space and form with the magic of South American spiritism, Cardoso discovered an Amazonian surrealism, rich in color and magic. There seemed to be an awareness in each canvas of the artist’s inherent capacity to steal magic from life, an awareness that expressed itself through a mystical, spiritual exploration of space.

Cardoso’s disciplined, complex formality stood in contrast to Herron grad Lindsey Davidson’s formal simplicity and quietude. Entombed beneath a layer of wax on small wood plates or trapped inside the loom of repetition in her large canvases were preoccupations with purity, femininity and fertility. These themes were expressed in the formal elements of the paintings, in the lightness of color and in a preference for natural materials, like wax and wood, but also in the images she chose to entomb and repeat — the silhouette of a woman, a bird or an infant as well as her own handwriting.

Rejecting traditional notions of innovation and intensity for the peace of rhythmic repetition, Davidson’s work falls in file with the abstractions of Agnes Martin or Jasper Johns. Daringly domestic and immodest in its fixation on a single image, the large repetitive canvases possessed a methodical violence that risked becoming obsessively mechanic but maintained grace and humanity.

The fact that Bleecker Street opened their doors for a show of this nature is an ambitious display of community spirit and cultural enthusiasm. Sangria Veritas was undoubtedly organized as an excuse to celebrate creativity in the good company of friends.