This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Feb. 1, 2011 - The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis opens the year by exhibiting two of the most highly regarded artists working anywhere today. Brooklyn-based painter Richard Aldrich and Brussels-based filmmaker Manon de Boer approach their respective media critically, breaking them down to their constitutive parts before building them anew.
For "Richard Aldrich and the 19th Century French Painting," Aldrich's first major solo exhibition, the artist has borrowed four paintings from the St. Louis Art Museum and presented them alongside his own works. While the relationship among the works is not made entirely clear, the gesture serves to stake Aldrich's claim to examining painting as both a practice and an object.
In other works, Aldrich layers canvases with oblique references to popular culture and his own biography. In "If I Paint Crowned I've Had It, Got Me" (2008), he literally cuts into the painting's canvas skin, revealing its skeletal stretchers as if he were performing an autopsy.
It appears that in general, Aldrich conceives of paintings as inhabitants of the world, who engage and inflecting their surroundings, and who are always in process, like human beings.
Manon de Boer takes a similar critical approach to film making, concentrating on the interwoven components of time, sound, and vision. Her "Two Times 4'33"" (2007) is a filming of the performer and audience of John Cage's iconic composition, in which music is replaced by ambient sound and the communal experience of time. "Presto, Perfect Sound" (2006) is a filmic study in achieving a musical ideal, while "Dissonant" (2010) examines the relationship between the dancer and the dance. Viewers should prepare to be challenged by both exhibitions, but also rewarded for the time and attention they invest.
Ivy Cooper, a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, is the Beacon art critic.