September 9th – October 15th
Opening Reception on Thursday September 9th at 6pm

A large-scale public installation of six painted banners and a wall drawing painted by 12 New Haven high school students through ARTSPACE's 2010 Summer Apprenticeship Program. Opening July 30th 5:30 - 7:00pm at ARTSPACE, 50 Orange Street, New Haven, CT

We see heaven more clearly, being kept from it. This is the lesson of Cat Balco’s “Net.” And while there is reason to accept her title, there is nothing here of Agamemnon snared for slaughter, or bird collectors with their thin webs stretched between poles. This is more a transparent fence, like the hurdles of woven willow that divided wilderness from planting on ancient British farms.

What if this was what Eve looked back at as she walked into our world, with the cherubim, tiny and potent, whirling on tracks around the borders of her lost garden? The bright boundary of the foreground throws the threads of landscape behind it into high relief. Interstices of shadowed blue and green, all that is visible of Eden’s rivers, shape the surface into an illusory panorama, as if vanishing points were forbidden.

There are colors here that belong to Andrea Mantegna’s 15th century wedding room in Mantua, where the ceiling of sky becomes a theatre balcony for children of paradise to peer down from. Balco has created dimensionality here with a palette that is also reminiscent of how Maxwell Parrish’s apparently fictional intensity of color is simply the realism of a common moment in a late summer evening. An invented spectrum can be the world being made to look as it is when closest to its creation, weaving it from colors alone.

Having known Balco’s earlier smaller scale works, an example of which is shown alongside this one, it is clear that they were fragments in advance of the whole that she has only been waiting to unpack. Instead of decaying into something like the puzzle pieces of a Pompeiian fresco, this painting emerges from its parts.

But it will be erased all it once. For now, it is installed where panels of sunlight envy its design. The windows open out on scenery of longing: stone piles, stripped foundations, a frozen waterfront, all sufficient reminders of how much we need painting like this. Perhaps this is not the last of it. LIke the movable wooden enclosures it evokes, it could be recreated in any other place, tracing heaven’s endless walls.

– Stephen Vincent Kobasa, contributing writer to Art New England and Big, Red and Shiny (www.BigRedandShiny.com).