Andrew Rafacz née Bucket Rider Gallery opened up the fall season with a solo exhibition of photo-based works by John Opera. In the smaller rear gallery were prints, also rooted in photography, by Matt Stolle. "Zoar and Other Works," the descriptive title for Opera’s exhibition, underscores the necessity of visiting galleries after the crammed oversexed opening festivities. Art, if you can see it, that strikes you as good tends to fall apart under closer scrutiny. And work that is made for the quiet and careful viewer often gets overlooked, again, if you can even see it. The latter is the case with Opera’s exhibition. I was mildly interested while doing the rounds the Friday it opened. It seemed like nothing special. But coming back later in the week and taking my time, it turned out to be perfectly keyed into my aesthetic sensibility.

The works in "Zoar …" clearly fall into two categories: abstractions created through multiple exposures and photographs of woods. It becomes evident, however, that the two speak to one another and spring from the same formal interest. Darker Diamond, the modest sized work that greats you as you enter the space, is a geometric pattern of squares nested inside diamonds that successively get lighter as they shrink in size (seen below). While an archival inkjet print, the image was devised through old-fashioned photography, each layer, each successive square or diamond, came about from an additional exposure. And while carefully aligned, the shapes aren’t perfect, they aren’t vectorized in Illustrator. This works in favor of the art. The image, a pure geometric abstraction, in its dark hues and imperfect lines links up with the past, both romantic and mysterious. It recalls Russian Constructivism, Man Ray and László Maholy-Nagy.

John Opera, Darker Diamond. 2007. Archival inkjet print, 20"x24," edition of . Image courtesy of Andrew Rafacz Gallery.

Shapes and patterns like this, as much as they recall earlier art, are also rooted in religions, secret societies and the occult. As the title Darker Diamond suggests, there is an ominous quality to the work that is also present in the forest pictures. In the title work Zoar, there is a small clearing on the bank of a river, it is an overcast day, a young man builds a fire and a faint plume of smoke wafts into the air, almost too perfect a shape to not have been manipulated. It too seems a little tinged with the macabre for some reason. The name of the piece comes from the location it was shot, the woods of Zoar Valley in western New York. “Zoar” also has Biblical and Hebrew implications. So it is not unrealistic to get a sense of the ancient from the piece’s title. The image itself seems to suggest a ritual of some sort is taking place—one beyond the tradition of camping.

Other images in the show capture this sense of the supernatural. They hark back to a time in man’s history where the wild was regarded as a place of mystery and danger; particularly once night falls. This feeling comes through in the light captured in Opera’s photos, they all seem to be taking place at a time just as the sun is going down, or a storm is rolling in. And they all confront the grey line where wooded areas get thick, where civilization stops and the wild begins, as in Meadow, where a solitary tree in the foreground is both a formal device and appears to be inhabited by a ghost (seen below).

John Opera, Meadow. 2006. C-print mounted to Sintra, 32" x 42".  Image courtesy of the artist and Johnopera.com.

The photos are also incredibly beautiful. For all the psychological implications of the dead flattened vegetation, caused by some long gone force, a mud slide perhaps, in Forest the formal beauty is overwhelming. The thick greens of the trees and their verticality on the incline is contrasted by the grey, bone like dead limbs horizontally oriented, flowing down the incline like a frozen river. Heightening the aesthetic experience as well as the general sense of dread is the high contrast. It seems like every line, crevice and indentation is a deep gouge rendered in stark black.

A pair of black and white images, Parliaments 1 & 2, geometric abstractions like Darker Diamond, are placed between Forest and Meadow and also lead to the rear gallery where Matt Stolle is. These photos are along the lines again of Modernist abstraction and photography in that very specific European period between the wars. The picture planes are demarcated like a Mondrian, white lines divide the image into fourths, and then a single diagonal cuts further. On the left picture, it goes from the lower left to the upper right. In the right it is answered. These divisions result in panes that are black, grey or light grey. The seemingly perfect symmetry is thwarted by the ghostly double exposures and fuzzy halos of the white lines. Parliaments perfectly addresses the way artists like Ellsworth Kelly have looked at window frames and seen powerful suggestions for paintings. Or the way Sol LeWitt’s cubicle constructions not only define space in their white frames, but also imply it with their shadows.

Looking at Parliaments, in pristine white frames that echo their imagery, your eye then moves to the imperfect symmetrical lines created by shadows of similar grays and angles as seen in the prints themselves. You have a gestalt moment and notice the gallery is a perfect rectangular white box with Donald Judd-like book shelves that mirror each other in the office area, overlooked by a large grid picture window. The floor of course is wood, and suddenly you get how the formalism of the photos taken in nature, and the abstractions created in the camera are all working on the same wavelength, simultaneous contrasting and re-enforcing one another.

--Erik Wenzel

(Top inset image: John Opera, Zoar.)