Any work of art worth looking at is worth spending a little time with, but Barry Nemett's works need more time than most, as his show at the Jewish Community Center reveals.
I'm talking about works that are obviously the artist's major statements. This large exhibit contains works going back to 1973, with the theme of nature running through virtually all of them. Most are modest-sized pictures of landscape and landscape elements (trees, typically) executed in Nemett's soft palette of greens and browns.
But in 1981, Nemett began creating works on a much larger scale -- up to 10 feet in one dimension or another. At first these verged on the abstract, as with 1981's "Stevenson Landscape" and "Seasons." By 1987, with the triptych "Sideglances" (one of the most impressive works here), he combined multiple images, mostly birds, trees and rocks, and words.
By the 1990s, with "An Owl's Tale" (1991) and "Tapestry/Reunion" (1993), he developed a style in which images present themselves first as an overall design. But, in time, more individual images become visible within the picture, from extreme closeups of a fragment of a tree to distant mountain scenes.
Ideally, we should finally see both these aspects of the work -- the overall image and the images that make it up -- more or less simultaneously. From that point of view, the most successful of these complex works is the most recent, "Seasons II" of 1994. In "Seasons II," Nemett comes close to achieving a true synthesis, with parts and whole visible at once. And, from some distance, the whole image seems to be in motion, gliding gently past the viewer's eye.
One can see in these works something of impressionism, Cezanne and cubism. But that's not as important to developing an appreciation of them as simply looking at them for a long time -- and that's less an exercise in concentration than an agreeable stroll around the picture.
Some artists suffer from having many of their works shown together; Nemett is just the opposite. To trace his development in a show such as this is to realize how much goes into an individual picture, and how much there is to be gotten out of it. This show does both Nemett and his audience a service.
BARRY NEMETT
Where: Jewish Community Center, 5700 Park Heights Ave.
When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays and Tuesdays; 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesdays; 3 to 5 p.m. Thursdays; noon to 2:30 p.m. Fridays; 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays, through Jan. 2
Call: (410) 542-4900