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ART

A SLOW EVOLUTION TOWARD EXCELLENCE
By Ken Barrow |

It is said so often that it has become a cliche: serious art collectors may live in Dallas, but they buy their art in New York City. If this is more truth than truism, it certainly isn’t because Dallas lacks serious galleries. Admittedly, the list would be short-no more than a handful of galleries, at most. But it would surely include the Eugene Binder Gallery, which begins its second year in its Fair Park space this September. The Binder has managed to survive a very fragile economy that has seen the demise of other excellent galleries such as Carol Taylor, Carpenter & Hochman, and DW Gallery. Moreover, it has done so because of (some might say despite) owner Gene Binder’s policy of showing work by the best local artists plus important work from elsewhere-the kind of work the art lover in this city is not likely to encounter outside the pages of art magazines. It hasn’t been easy, as Gene Binder no doubt would be the first to admit. But showing the best contemporary art never is.

Binder opens his fall season on September 16 with a show of paintings by Richard Shaffer. Shaffer has been a local favorite since his paintings were the subject of the Dallas Museum of Art’s first one-man Concentration exhibits in 1981. Seemingly straightforward, realistic paintings of the artist’s studio, Shaffer’s works depicted an elementary architecture of walls, windows, easels, and frames caught in moments of perfect stillness. But the real subject was space, as defined by deep shadows and mysterious light.

In the eight years since, Shaffer’s work has undergone a slow evolution, Tantalizing signs of the human presence and even glimpses of the human figure have entered the space, though the space itself remains as mysterious and still as ever. He likes to glue personal objects like postcards and photographs to the surface of his paintings, introducing a sly interplay between the painted and the real world. There even are rumors that he has been at work on some landscapes.

But beneath the metamorphoses, the artist’s work remains meditative and deeply philosophical. A forty-two-year-old Californian who studied art and philosophy in New York before moving to the Dallas area, he seems equally at home in a visionary Eastern world in which illusion lurks behind the clarity of everyday objects, and in a tough-minded Western realism in which objects are what they seem, no more, no less. His paintings demonstrate that, far from being exhausted or dead, realistic painting is still capable of carrying the weightiest of ideas.

Surprisingly, despite the popularity of his 1981 Dallas museum exhibit, the Binder show is Shaffer’s first gallery exhibit in Dallas. (Though not his last, however; he will return to the Eugene Binder Gallery next June.)

The subjects of the gallery’s other two fell shows, on the other hand, are familiar figures in local galleries. Sam Gummelt was one of the old Delahunty Gallery artists, but his big, abstract canvases, with their elaborately worked surfaces of oil, crayon, dirt, and encaustic, have not been seen locally for several years. That will change with the Binder show October 28 through November 25.

And Dan Rizzie’s face has been beaming at us all summer from billboards and from the pages of magazines. According to his Dewar Scotch profile, Rizzie is “Deep in the Art of Texas,” though how deep and in what arts is left to the imagination. None of his paintings are in evidence in the billboards, at any rate, and the object in his hand could as well be a baton as a paintbrush. You wouldn’t know it from the ads, but Rizzie can really paint. Moreover, his paintings and collages-witty takeoffs on cubism, constructivism, and other movements of the early avant-garde-consistently sell out when they are exhibited in New York. His show at the Binder opens on December 2.

Good sales in New York, of course, are no measure of good art. But it is good to know, when times are as tough on galleries as they have been here in Dallas, that good art will sell somewhere.

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