'Figurative Tendencies'

Staten Island Advance
April 18, 2004

Museum-goers can see the forest and the trees in Island painter Craig Manister’s one-man show.

Viewers have choices at Craig Manister’s one-man show at the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences. They can solve the mystery or just enjoy the spectacle.

Mystery? The mystery is which came first, the seemingly abstract painting or the figurative ones.

Manister’s adventurous evolution as a painter has no precedent on the Island, and in “Figurative Tendencies” he’s reached a buoyant, luminous juncture. People who have never had a long, happy stay in a roomful of contemporary, abstract paintings may find themselves drawn in and lifted up by his art.

Typically, modern/contemporary painters cut their teeth on figurative compositions. That is, they paint recognizable elements – people, flowers, dogs. Gradually, with time, these things get more and more abstract. They lose definition. They becoming flickers, shapes and suggestions.

And then, typically, they fall out of the picture completely.

Manister has proceeded the opposite way. After 20 years of painting 99 percent pure abstract stuff, he is now producing pictures in which recognizable elements, trees, clouds even some drapes, appear.

The museum’s selection, organized by Bart Bland, the museum’s director of exhibitions, is like a palindrome, the phrase that’s the same backwards and forwards. (example, A daffodil or slid off Ada). Either way you look at it, it makes sense.

But how could trees represent a momentous breakthrough? They do, giving the intensity of Manister’s engagement as a painter.

The earliest piece is a turning-point 1991 canvas, “Carpet Ride,” a thickly painted abstract that’s almost monochromatically blue, a bright, deep blue. It is the foundation of the next 12 years worth of paintings.

“Carpet Ride” resembles its predecessors: Flat and dimension-free and full of movement and textures. Except this one has hints, in flashing tatters of color, of things shaping up, solidifying. A nebulous yellow presence something like a keyhole seems to be coming into being near the center of the painting.

This semi-keyhole is the proverbial key to further developments. In paintings made after “Carpet Ride,” the keyhole returns, develops a more confident shape and multiples. Eventually, it sprouts wings or haloes or gets pierced with arrows. It’s the star player in “Figure in Desert” and “Figures at Lakeside.” Painting by painting, it begins to look more human.

Work in the last four years often carries religious or mythological titles (“A Deposition,” “Icarus,” “Martyr,” “Annunciation”) that are probably related to the artist’s recent stays in Italy. Colors are brilliant – fiery yellow, scarlet, deep blue. At the opening reception, guests spoke enthusiastically about the glittering palette.

“I don’t want anyone – especially Craig – to hear me say this,” one wag murmured, “but these paintings remind me of the Impressionists.”

Once the color excitement has subsided, Manister’s method becomes more noticeable.

Works in “Figurative Tendencies” aren’t drawn in the conventional way, by means of outlines and shadings.

The final burst of pleasure for the viewer is watching how the keyhole figures, clouds, trees, lakes are built bit by bit out of brush strokes. It isn’t all perfectly clear, which is the artist’s intention. Ask him about it.

“I am a firm believer in enigma,” he’ll tell you.

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