The Red Room @ Pandora's Cup
Wednesday 03 July @ 10:20:24 |
 by Mary Ann Vincenta
From the labyrinth of a mind turning to the past, to the dark recesses of Pandora’s Cup, ornately framed and exactly crafted, comes The Red Room, recent work of Anthony Austin Schrock in oil, acrylic, pastel, charcoal and chalk. In the deliberate, harmonious, old clutter of this very hip coffee shop on Hennepin Avenue where the sounds of pinball machines, shuffling cards, whirring fans, and music form another kind of not unpleasant clutter, Schrock’s sad, chiseled feminine faces turn away, hiding their secrets, or look right through you, their perfect secrets intact.
Heavy frames and a heavy palette suggest old paintings in European museums. But, despite leaded windows, orange tiled roofs or a whitewashed villa wall in shadow that lead the viewer to the sensuality of another time, Schrock’s still lifes, faces and nudes remain new and unexplored. They’re not clones of Vermeer or Manet or anybody else.
A Vermeer-like interior is on display at the entrance of the coffeehouse. The comely woman turning toward the window as she unties her apron intimates a private, passionate story of controlled melancholy, disciplined domestic weariness, longing for an expanded pantheon.
Small still lifes grace the downstairs living room: grapes and pears that the viewer is confident will be peeled with silver knives to reveal the pleasure of their mysterious interiors and eaten in old, cool kitchens where food is cooked on the hearth, and where water is drawn from the well to cleanse pewter pitchers, crockery and copper pots.
A chamber upstairs holds a group of sketched portraits and a nude on a couch that are very competent illustrations but lack the mystery and sensuality of the rest of the show. In that group, only a partially shadowed frontal female nude, whose limbs and head are not shown, digs up an obscured sensation, that of vulnerability.
A curious canvas of a disheveled woman wearing a pale, shift-like garment that she has pulled up to the top of her thighs as she stands in water (or ink or wine), along with the portrait next to it, employ the same throaty, deep hues as the rest of the show. But the lines are less exact, the application of color less demarcated.
Self-taught, Schrock shows his admiration for the art of the far distant past, his obsession with ancient statues, in the “Greek alcove” where three paintings of sculpted busts replicate the texture, the look, almost the smell, of stone. With their white marble eyes like shadowy planets in eternal orbit, the long-forgotten dead cast their haunting aura.
The Red Room is currently open and continues through July 31. Reception Fri. July 5, 7 p.m. Pandora’s Cup, 2516 Hennepin Ave., Mpls. 612-381-0700.
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