Music's ability to express emotions or even convey character is accepted and understood. Abstract art, beyond maybe the connotations of certain colors, not so much.
If you doubt the power of abstraction, go to the Contemporary. Jack Whitten's memorial paintings should convince you that visual art can sing.
Whitten, 69, has spent half a century exploring the potential of painting. For him, the canvas is less a blank slate than a welcoming matrix for experiments with paint and a multitude of other materials, from glass shards and pulverized Mylar to sumi ink and blood —- often affixed or applied with tools of his own invention.
But he was never a pure formalist, and that is most apparent in the abstract portraits of family, mentors and heroes here. Compare the suave fluid composition dedicated to jazz great Duke Ellington and the dense, gritty accumulation of textures conjuring the angry author James Baldwin.
The show's climax is "9/11/01," a masterful evocation of the physical, human and emotional carnage of that day. A pyramid, a reference to memorial architecture and the dollar bill, dominates the 10-by-12-foot painting. Pierced by missiles, it stands beneath the ironic blue sky, surrounded by bone and charred debris.
Whitten constructed the painting as one would a mosaic, using hundreds of little blocks of hardened paint infused with blood, cinder and other materials. This herculean labor, which took two years, seems to have depleted the artist emotionally. He has retreated into formal play in the more recent memorials, in which grid, pattern and experiments with materials come to the fore.
Ably curated by gallery director Stuart Horodner, the exhibit does much more than explore a single theme in Whitten's oeuvre. The sum of these paintings is a portrait of the artist himself. The people he chose to honor give a sense of his life and values, and the work's span —- from 1965 to the present —- charts the evolution of his style.
He emerges as an artist engaged in vigorous dialogue with his time and the history of art. For instance, the little blocks of hardened paint summon up a range of references: the Byzantine mosaics he studied during summers spent in the Mediterranean. The grid, the ubiquitous matrix of contemporary art. The pixels of photography and new media.
The objects (or casts of objects) taken from the everyday world send the conversation in a totally different direction, one that includes self-taught artists such as Thornton Dial (a fellow native of Bessemer, Ala.), who also uses materials symbolically.
This is one of the most important exhibits the Contemporary has offered in a long time. In addition to the quality of the work, it offers up a role model of a life in art, which Whitten has pursued with rigor and integrity through the peaks and valleys of a long career.
And the show puts us in the middle of a national dialogue —- something we need more of —- namely the current re-examination of Whitten and other artists whose work did not fit the thrust of contemporary art, as defined by critics and historians of the 1980s and '90s.
If we should be skeptical of anything, it is not the power of abstraction but the all-knowingness of the gatekeepers.
REVIEW
"Jack Whitten: Memorial Paintings"
Through June 14. $5; $3, seniors and students; free to members, children under 12 and on Thursdays. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; until 8 p.m. Thursdays. The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, 535 Means St. N.W., Atlanta. 404-688-1970; www.thecontemporary.org.
Artist talk: 7 p.m. May 15, Hill Auditorium, High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree St., Atlanta. $5.
Bottom line: A handsome and intelligent exhibition, one of the Contemporary's most important, offers not only powerful paintings but also an exemplar of a life in art.
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