Victor Macarol - a fluid way of encountering the surrealby Peggy Lewis Victor Macarol combines the symbols of everyday life in a way to transcend the ordinary. Often his prints achieve an epic quality. To paraphrase Jerry Uelsmann, whose interest lean to the surreal, Macarol finds "the medium...a fluid way [of encountering] that other reality." For Macarol the image is an encounter. Though who knows how long he has stood anticipating an event? And once he has discovered a setting - be it park, facade, street corner, shop front, a bench, bench, bench, almost anywhere - does he make himself invisible like a hunter in a duck blind, waiting for the human subjects of a silver print-to-be to perform, unknowingly, in front of his lens? If he does not, how does he perform his magic? Macarol's prints are anecdotal. They tell sometimes poignant, sometimes ironic stories, sometimes fantasies that seem to have sprung full-blown from dreams. His artistry lies in the way he imbues them with poetry, melody, mystery; in the way he sees them as painting, never failing to observe a certain geometry. Over and over, his prints reveal a ladder of parallels, a parade of attenuated rectangles, a thrust of trapezoids, a strong partnership of triangles and an eclipse of circles. He controls his tones as though applying washes of light and dark, thus he achieves a lyrical quality. In a print, for example, Macarol has captured two young women as they frolic on earth-bound stilts somewhere in a loading zone of industrial Manhattan. They seem to have been born of the same inspiration John Keats found for his famous ode on Lord Holland's urn. As they perform to silent music, they suggest the permanence of art, of beauty, as Keats wrote ("Ode on a Grecian Urn"),
"For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd
For ever painting, and for ever young..."
Or they remind us
"When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain..."
The verticality of the composition presents a classical ambiance: the stilt dancers are reminiscent of the caryatids that support the Erectheum. The print itself stretches like a column, every growing in height. But what are the dancers doing in that environment? What riddle does Macarol pose?A poet and a wit, Macarol puns with form and image, shape and content. One of his prints portrays two boys standing in front of a multitextured brick and cement wall. They stare stonily ahead awaiting, perhaps, the click of a shutter-release button. One of the boys holds a ball. The two oval heads and the spherical ball - or is it a third head? - form a triangle within a rectangle. In another print, the curves of two columns break a progression of squares, and a huge circle carries the message, "I Am the Best Artist." A figure flies through the doorway screaming the message to the world. The stripes of his T-shirt scream against the patterned stones and contrast with the vertical stripes of a wrought-iron rail. The flying figure also makes the architecture breathe. But is he the best artist? Yes or no? Conflict and tension provide some of the drama in Macarol's prints. The conflict of people and signs, of the real and the ersatz, transforms a commonplace event of everyday life into something extraordinary. A young girl wearing a paper crown walks briskly down a street swinging a bag of fruit. She is masquerading as an adult. Obliquely in front of her, a mannikin, wigless but elegant, stands as if she were about to move, her arms about to swing. The girl is unaware of the mannikin, but she swings her arms identically. The two, the girl and the woman, the quick and the fake, create tension under the marquis of "Edelia," a cosmetics and bath shop in Paris. Is the fake the ideal? Does Macarol contrast the real with the idealization of the manufactured? Or is he simply predicting things to come? A mannikin also figures in another print in which an obese, beturbaned woman buttoned up in a lumberjacket hurries over a brick sidewalk in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In the shop window behind her, her alterego, a perfectly-proportioned mannikin postures in the window undressed and unassembled - a twentieth-century Aphrodite of Melos, Venus de Milo. Art historian, the late Sheldon Cheney, described this sculpture as the statue in which "womanhood is least generalized and it is possible to feel that the statue stands for generic woman rather than a naked model" (Sculpture of the World, 1968). In these prints Macarol's attitude toward this is as enigmatic as his attitude toward the human condition. Is he being nonjudgmental and objective, or does he illustrate the more human aspects of urban blight? Another Macarolian symbol, the bench, figures in two prints quite unlike each other. In one, "On the Bench," a young man lies on a bench with slats that parallel the bricks below. With the arm he uses as a pillow, he clutches the bench as if it were a life raft; the other arm angles rigidly above. Behind him on textured patches of grass, a young woman lolls on a blanket, her knees up, like a grace note. The extreme horizontality of this picture suggests anything but serenity. It suggests instead great "speed." One wonders if Macarol is punning again. In a nearly square composition, Macarol hypnotizes the viewer with parallels - the slats of a bench and stripes of painted bricks - as a man lounging on the bench and a pigeon gazing at him nearby seem to be engaged and deeply engrossed in some form of humanavian rapport. Parallel stripe, stripes like the lines of a staff, seem to be one of Macarol's leitmotifs. In a dizzying view of an apartment building, Rue Lamarck 91, in Paris, Macarol uses parallels in a series of balconies. He sees parallels of a different nature in a man an woman leaning over a balcony four stories above their opposite numbers, also leaning over a balcony. Heads down, the couples have taken nearly the same positions (another parallel), but the men look in opposite directions. Perhaps the couples are engaged in similar conversations. Or is it all just a "facade" (pun?) for Macarol's show of contrasting textures in brick, wrought iron, glass, net curtains and patterned door frames. In contrast to this vertiginous view, Macarol presents a pristine office scene, an interior empty except for a section of a woman's sleeved and braceleted arm. Unlike the armless Venus, she is bodiless. The print suggests an elegant spaciousness, a certain austerity, and intention to intimidate, and the great separation of insiders and outsiders. Here Macarol frames the parallels in an abstraction on a wall beyond the desk. Otherwise he has captured the thrust of angles in the desk and the strong verticals of the doorway, as well as the ruthlessness of the business world. The interior expresses a feeling of finality, an unspoken warning, "caveat emptor," and an abrupt ending. So be it.
Concrete and abstract elements combine in Macarol's silver prints, Macarol invites the viewer to "travel through my pictures and discover the real thoughts of an artist," an impossibility. The "real thoughts" are complex and evanescent. First you see them, then you don't. They glimmer through a web of mystery in Macarol's silver prints, his art. * "Discovering Victor Macarol" by Peggy Lewis, Lambertville, New Jersey is a preface in the exhibition brochure for Victor Macarol's one-man exhibition at Optique Gallery in Lambertville, New Jersey. ___________________________________________________________________________
** [On exhibit: Optique Gallery] - "Victor Macarol: Silver Prints," an exhibition of
Peggy Lewis ___________________________________________________________________________
|