Victor Macarol - Reviews in Brief___________________________________________________________________________
Portraits: An Exhibition of Silver Prints by Victor Macarol Victor Macarol's portraits of cats, dogs and pigeons show the artist as prestidigitator. Macarol has surprised his subjects in the act of observing - nonjudgmental, of course - human behavior. Two pigeons, for example, watch two lovers on a street corner. Do they contemplate and then discard the idea of following suit? Or Macarol spies on his subjects in unexpected habitats, assuming anthropomorphic roles: A dog at the steering wheel of a car pokes his head out the window to maneuver more efficiently. Not reportage at all, Macarol's silver prints are more poetic narrative, with quixotic, bizarre, unexpected and mysterious messages. Portrait #8 focuses on a piece of garden sculpture in front of a bench. Because the (living) trees behind the bench vanish in blackness, a pigeon on the pebbly ground, is the only sigh of life in this striking composition. Portrait #3 - a catch of fish garlanded on ice shavings - has the chiaroscuro of a Rembrandt. The viewer, who cannot guess the size of the shavings, has no sense of scale, and the catch can be minute or mammoth. Sometimes Macarol captures an environment that seems neither indoors nor out: In the portrait of a dog next to a cement sculpture that looks Egyptian, for example, patterns of cement and screen combine artfully to dislocate time and place.
Macarol's silver prints leave memorable images: A cat peers out a Honing textures and observing or otherwise exposing surfaces usually hidden, Macarol bends light to his purposes. He turns everyday events into fables, myths and epics, setting them in an aura of mystery that he leave to the viewer to solve.
Peggy Lewis ___________________________________________________________________________
Victor Macarol: Silver Prints Victor Macarol's work has a sometimes anecdotal, sometimes epic quality. Often his prints, slices of life in urban settings - at least those at Optique [Gallery] - could be dream fragments. Though Macarol intends no social commentary when he captures a setting and populates it with a cast of real and manufactured characters, somehow he manages to dramatize certain aspects of the state of the world. He describes life in such environments as Washington Square, St. Marks Place, a shop in Paris, a street in Zurich. In "Canal Street, New York," Macarol has found a gigantic broken doll. She lies dismembered on the stand of a streetside vendor. Her legs have been torn apart at the knee. Her thighs are empty cavities. Her face, however, is untouched by the violence that Macarol points out - the rape of the doll. In "St. Marks Place," a girl sits cross-legged, combing her long hair beside a poster of Patti Smith in a tank top. Macarol often catches people imitating conscious or subconscious role models. The areas of the girl's hair and the street below, form adjacent triangles and create a dynamic composition. Macarol roams the city streets and investigates its subcultures, allowing the viewer to intrude on his discoveries. Playing the fly on the wall we notice his penchant for benches, mannikins, pigeons, dogs, shop windows, street signs, garbage bags and cans, as well as the more permanent aspects of urban culture. A pigeon ponders its reflection in a large puddle of water. It is the only living entity in the print. Everything else is a reflection - the world turned upside down - trees, buildings, light. Macarol seems to be predicting an upside-down world that exists on the other side of the looking glass and a lone pigeon left to view it. This print, "December in Zurich," among others in the stunning collection at Optique, might have emerged from a dream.
Peggy Lewis ___________________________________________________________________________
Photography by Victor Macarol The prints at ETS have an ambiance entirely different from those at Optique [Gallery]. Here [Victor Macarol] shows fifteen silver prints, romantic, rural and architectural. He has transformed the Flat Iron Building in New York City to an obelisk. His lens made it monumental; his camera designated it the eighth wonder of the world. Three years ago in Lambertville, NJ, Macarol saw two houses on North Main Street when they were storefronts, at the start of revision, renovation and rebuilding. One house had a large flag hanging in the window in front of drapes. The other store windows vacantly reflect the scallop-boarded window of the front door. At another Lambertville location, he noticed the reflection of the roof of Van Horn's funeral home and a dead leaf in a puddle of water. Macarol had been busy exploring New Jersey when he discovered pumpkins at the edge of farmland, where they seem to have rolled in as part of a great landslide beneath a stormy sky. He also noted the conflict of a vertical span seen horizontally, leading nowhere; a slat fence that became an exercise in parallels. A prize, "Summer Storm," a landscape seen through a window covered with heavy raindrops, contains all of the elements of a gothic tale; it is misty and, at once, real and unreal. Says Macarol, "There is a space for imagination, for what one dreams." In all, the prints are less populated than those in the other show. They reflect Macarol's technical expertise and all possess an unmistakable lyrical quality.
Peggy Lewis ___________________________________________________________________________
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