Day: June 24, 2023

Tanel Veenre: BeforeAfter

June 24, 2023

Ornamentum, Hudson New York. June 24 – July 16, 2023

Tanel Veenre is an Estonian artist focusing on jewelry and wearables that he crafts from wooden organ pipe components, reconfigured into sculptural form. According to wikipedia he is a “jewelry artist,” an awkward phrase trying to describe the in-betweenness of his work. This show at Ornamentum in Hudson mixes elements of craft, jewelry, art, and even a bit of musicianship — apparently the pipes all still produce tone if you blow through them.

He comes from a family of artists and musicians, and if I have the story correctly these pieces are reconfigurations of a wooden organ that his father gave him as a gift.

I am pleased with Veenre’s choices to forgo emphasizing or fetishizing the joinery of the pieces, which is a notorious tempation when working with wood. Instead, the pipe components are reworked with collisional butt-joints and moments of hinging. The effect gives a feel of accidental form and beauty.

Contemporary Art, Painting

Michela Martello, in “The Divine, The Passion, and the Magic”

June 24, 2023

Visitor Center, Newburgh, New York, June 24 to August 19, 2023

I was given a tour of the Visitor Center by the director Eva Zanardi, an eloquent advocate of the Center. It was a group show, but I attended to see the incredible installation by Michela Martello.

This installation is a collection of pieces she worked on during a fellowship in Taiwan, working on these divinities on large scale filter paper. The works subject and style is a riff on the local religious traditions, and feminine divinity, but worked across large sheets of luminous filter paper. The resulting light-soaked space formed by shaping the papers into a circle is at once monumental and ephemeral, spiritual and fleeting.

The effect combines a fascinating level of detail and inventiveness, which also shifts to larger architectural scale as an installation shaping the space. The enclosure and filtered light were gorgeous.

Martello is a surpremely gifted draftsman, she has a lovely sense of line and balance of detail to large gesture. The portraits of the figures receive the most careful and nuanced attention with line, with other areas rapidly worked to describe texture or pattern.

Martello is from Grosseto, Italy but now based in New York City. I became personally acquainted with her work through its representation by Pen and Brush, where she has contributed beautiful and inventive work.