Glimpse into a world of Moroccan women

Oct. 20--Already two years ago Lalla Essaydi's tableaux of transgressive Moroccan women were as strong in aesthetics as politics. But her new color photographs at the Schneider Gallery have raised the artistic stakes higher, as they're based on poses from 19th-Century Orientalist paintings.

The Middle-Eastern fictions she refers to are by artists major and minor. None of them actually saw harem life, but they imagined an exotic, erotic world that Essaydi's pictures play upon but "purify" through restricted color and, ultimately, overturn through the diaristic writings she executes on figures, clothing and settings alike. (Writing is done by men, not women, in Morocco.)

The dark borders from holders of the film have disappeared from the finished prints, leaving them open to the greater detail the photographer sought by moving from a four-by-five to eight-by-ten-inch camera. But, as before, the impact of the images comes from the creation of a world at once photographic and painterly, staged and seemingly spontaneous, withdrawn and assertive.

Unlike before, where Moroccan women had to hide the writing on their bodies until it wore off, the women in the new pictures all live in Boston, safely removed from both the fantasy and reality of the world Essaydi so delicately explores.

At 230 W. Superior St., 312-988-4033.

Markus Linnenbrink's exhibition at the Roy Boyd Gallery clearly proceeds from his last show here in 2004, patiently extending the colorful discourse of his abstract paintings but still showing a link with the more sober pieces he did in his hometown of Dortmund, Germany nearly two decades ago.

In place of the many organic shapes Linnenbrink scooped out in pockets to reveal early layers of paintings are now even greater numbers of concentric circles that densely cluster and, occasionally, break away. The intense chromatic variations uncovered by the artist's "excavations" give each undulating surface a wildness that seems held in check by the precision of his primary unit, the circle, in combination with a glossy, hard application of pigment. At once there is the sense of nothing being left up to chance as well a strong improvised element.

Linnenbrink's vertical stripe paintings are more conventional, though they, too, are coloristically brilliant, invariably end in drips that become stalactites at the bottom of each work and are painted with such thickness and slickness as to prompt touch. It is as if the somber minimalism of the artist's early years had been reapproached and pursued while on peyote.

The quirks continue to be "sandwiches" of paint that rise to a height of 18 layers, scooped-out paintings that refer to reclining nudes and pieces incorporating photographs (this time from streets in Oklahoma) along with all the other vigorously bubbling stimuli.

At 739 N. Wells St., 312-642-1606.

Thaddeus Mosley is a self-taught sculptor whose primary material is wood. His acknowledged influences are Constantin Brancusi, Isamu Noguchi, African art and jazz. His 10 pieces, large and small, at the NavtaSchulz Gallery generally avoid the smooth and lyrical in favor of states more precarious.

The most commanding pieces are tall verticals assembled from several rough, irregular components notched and inserted one into the other. Each segment bears ample evidence of Mosley's chisel that has caused the surfaces of his sycamore, walnut and cherry wood to break up light in facets delicately contrasting with the force of each piece's overall thrust.

Some of the shapes on view evoke axes, shields, propellers and semaphores. But the way they are assembled draws away from the representational association to the larger issue of upright balance or, as poet Nathaniel Mackey nicely put it, "a steadiness perhaps caught between staggers."

Often here Mosley combines woods, presumably reveling in the play of colors. This, like the faceted surfaces, enhances his tilting, bending and leaning forms rather than draws attention to itself. Only in the three small shelf or tabletop pieces, however, does he veer away from the suggestion of rawness given by every piece that stands directly on the floor, and they make us curious to see what he'd do if that sort of elegance were to be enlarged.

At 1039 W. Lake St., 312-421-5506

Robert Schultz's graphite drawings at Printworks are of the human figure in strong light. Several of the figures are nude, and the play of light occasionally minimizes their sensuality, suggesting that the artist uses his models as just another object in a composition, in the manner of Philip Pearlstein. Other works, however, show he is more interested in physical and psychological tension, at times letting the physical externalize the psychological.

Schultz's drawing, as drawing, is meticulous and tight; were it any more so, some might mistake his pieces for the photographs in which his art is based. This gives his work a coolness of temperature that the stresses in the figures sometimes seek to raise. But even the cold pieces are affecting, as they convey the hard absoluteness of visual fact.

Less convincing to my eyes are drawings in which props, such as a long cloth, become the means of putting Schultz's figures under stress. And, similarly, when he poses a nude female on an animal skull, the result conveys an homage occasioned by the death of magic realist John Wilde more because a title tells us than the drawing actually expresses it, for the contrivance of magic realism now looks unnatural to Schultz.

At 311 W. Superior St., 312-664-9407.

Lalla Essaydi at the Schneider Gallery through Oct. 28.

Markus Linnenbrink at the Roy Boyd Gallery through Nov. 28.

Thaddeus Mosley at the Navta Schulz Gallery through Nov. 18.

Robert Schultz at Printworks through Oct. 28.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Chicago Tribune

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