PREVIOUS EXHIBITION
current  |  previous  |  upcoming

sume

THE "INTROSPECTIVE REALISM OF WILLARD LUSTENADER”

by Stephen D. Salamone, Ph.D.
Brad Cooper Gallery Lecturer on Art & Culture

I have just encountered the work of Willard Lustenader.   Brad Cooper is at my right and we are looking into one of Bill’s portraits, "Other Voices, Other Rooms". What a surprise! Suddenly I remember that art is all about objective communication; or the communication of objects. In some sense, looking at one of Lustenader's scenarios is looking into and through a concealed reality revealed only by degrees of objective visual reference.

In "Other voices, Other Rooms", for instance, we are met by a melancholy woman around early middle age whose naked torso at first blocks our entry into her world. She is gazing, reddened eyes, off to our left, bidding us to leave the scene, as she herself appears to be doing. While her naked shoulder blocks our entry through the door frame in which she poses, we are blocked again by a solid mass of white wall which covers nearly the whole painting to the right of her torso; the wall itself punctuated only by a paper cutout, miniature Japanese (?) dress and the top two rungs of a simple wooden chair. Yet we strain to look over her shoulder into an apparently vast room, through a hallway (?) into still another deeply set room where some remote figure is casually sitting in a deep armchair before an unlit, antique fireplace. It may occur to us that this is not a room after all that we are being denied access to, but perhaps her own private memory. What appears to be objective space may in fact be just an allusion of space.

And here is where Lustenader reminds me that painting is about the communion of objects, "objective" communication in the two dimensional sense. About the "objectivity" that we all seek in art when we turn it to the purpose of communication. When we are forced to look beyond the surface artifice of the thing and meet the maker. The maker of art and of memory. Lustenader may be introducing his audience to a new permutation of artistic realism, an introspective vision that turns things round and introduces us to the backside of reality right before our eyes!