Reviews: Vermont
Rick Devin: The Persistent Enigma
University of Rhode Island Library Gallery • Kingston, RI • www.uri.edu/library/gallery
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Rick Devin’s witty, wry acrylic paintings and assemblages have the quality of fractured fairy tales, combining surreal imagery with titles that allude to fables and folk tales.
This collection features fourteen images on the wall and two display cases filled with smaller works. The exhibition title is also the name of the first painting on display. In it, a zebra pokes its head through a golden doorframe among the waves in a sea-and-sky setting depicted within a rectangular grid. Variations of these elements, including a series of hovering or splashing balls tinted slightly differently in each picture, are repeated in several other paintings, with the main subject replaced.
Some, such as the title image, emphasize the riddle aspect of our lives and dreams. Homeland Security, showing a white rabbit (symbol of magicians’ tricks and Wonderland) in the zebra’s spot, tweaks the moralistic quality of fables. Others play with archetypes. In Magician’s Lament, a trapped figure suggests the fate of Merlin, his magic reduced to escaping bubbles. In Waiting for the Ferry, groups of little, green stubby pencils with eraser heads and sharpened points for feet, assemble on a dock. The First Temptation of Aqua Boy subverts the mythology of a popular comic-book superhero.
Most of the paintings are deceptively serene and whimsical, dreamy visions anchored by anxieties often conveyed in the expressions of the main subjects. In Night of the Gherkin, an old peasant in a mountain village walks under a crescent moon, nervously watching as giant, green pickles hover overhead like a squadron of zeppelins. The Day the Lilies Left offers a poetic and lyrical narrative. Two green frog-men face one another from opposite sides of a lake, standing as sentinels. Between them, a sequence of flowering lily pads lift off like flying saucers as the frog-men watch helplessly with bemused, concerned expressions. In one last wink to the viewer, Devin deconstructs his own myth by painting a folded corner peeling off from the scene and water (or glue) oozing from behind the image.
—Doug Norris
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