[The San Francisco Examiner]
Friday, Jan. 5, 1996 · Page C 1
©1997 San Francisco Examiner
Using the old bean
David Bonetti
[...]
Celebrity and fandom might be inextricably caught up with
contemporary life, but neither was born yesterday. TERRAIN,
165 Jessie St., has taken the long view, and it has mounted
an exhibition "Oscar Wilde: A Man of Great Importance," to
honor the epigrammatic Irishman, a model of the artist as
celebrity, on the 100th anniversary of his imprisonment for
the crime of sodomy. (It continues through Jan. 13.)
TERRAIN is working Wilde's local connections, and it reminds
the gallery visitor (and the 30 primarily local artists it
invited to submit work to the show) of Wilde's two visits
here. At the end of his first visit, he wrote, familiarly,
"I've left my heart in San Francisco." And in "The Picture
of Dorian Gray" he wrote, "It is an odd thing, but everyone
who disappears is said to be in San Francisco. It must be a
delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next
world."
Wilde stayed at the old Palace Hotel, and Mario Calvano has
painted a portrait of the writer in its Palm Court, which
didn't exist at that time. Rudy Lemcke has also produced a
Wildean portrait, but in the more up-to-date medium of the
digital print.
TERRAIN supplied its artists with quotations from Wilde's
works to help spur their imaginations. It is interesting to
compare how two or more artists treated the same text. Kico
Govantes and Leo Bersamina both tackled a poem that begins
by comparing the moon to a yellow seal, but you'd never know
by the results that they started in the same place.
The most beautiful works contributed are the two paintings
of "Lady Windermere's Fan" by Julie Hodge, who has used the
old technique of glazing to create lush, nostalgic
neo-Baroque images reminiscent of Ross Bleckner. And the
most bizarre work is the death head by Teresa A. Smith made
of film negatives of gay male porno stars. Because of the
way it's lighted, you see the images projected on the inside
of the skull, a perhaps not inappropriate approximation of
Mr. Wilde's own brain.
[...]
Return to Paintings by Julie Hodge