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Pam
Zappardino |  | | | More than the sum of the parts | | | By Pamela Zappardino, Art Critic | Thursday, November 08, 2007 | | | "Polyptych" takes a while to figure out. The name doesn't
conjure up an image right away, but you can get there with a little help from Latin - and maybe geometry. "Di" refers
to two and "tri" to three. So diptychs are works of art with two panels, triptychs with three. Poly indicates many
- many items, many sides and, in this case, many panels.
Sean Taylor literally
constructs his works: painting, assembling, bolting and wiring. His works are structural, the frameworks important elements.
He likens them to the design of a medieval altarpiece or the page of a comic book." Quite a contrast, but he's right
on.
Contrasts are everywhere. Walking into the Rice Gallery in McDaniel's Peterson Hall, you notice them right
away. "Riddle of the Sphinx" is reminiscent of the Sistine Chapel in its heroic proportions. Classic forms take
on horrific life, dismembered, twisted yet strangely not repulsive. Rather, the opposite. There is something familiar here.
The ceiling in Rice wasn't quite high enough for the myriad panels that are "Sphinx," so Taylor laid the bottom
two on the floor. They reach out drawing viewers into the work.
The colors, even the reds, are soft. Taylor plans
for the "audience [to] be lulled by... the cotton-candy palette ... only to be forced to reckon with the somewhat disturbing
narrative that is being created with the imagery." His plan succeeds. We want to look.
Glamour on the high
wire is divided from a bouffant-haired madonna by a "Fine Line," life's choices laid bare. A Cub Scout in full
uniform looks unseeingly toward chaos and war, safe in his own panel for now, cautioned to "Be Prepared."
"Desire, Inc." seems unfinished, like the lives of the young women from a bygone era at their debut. It is sweet
and expectant and just a bit whimsical. Humor turns to irony, as separate panels give lie to "Nothing Can Come Between
Us," separate lives in shared delusion. A successful man has "No Regrets" as he looks back on a life he might
have lived. Or does he?
Taylor works with abstracted edges, images just detailed enough. Time and depth lurk between
disjointed panels. He tries "to create an elusive quality ... allowing many interpretations. ... My wish is that the
paintings grant a glimpse of raw humanity and that they instill a desire to keep going back for another look."
I haven't been able to get many of these paintings out of my mind since the opening last week. I think Taylor got his
wish.
Pamela Zappardino teaches art appreciation. Reach her at artzap@aol.com.
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