Stuart Shils (1954 - )
The Wall Street Journal
Review by Lance Espund
Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects at Gallery Schlesinger
24 E. 73rd St.
Through Oct. 17
Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, which began two years ago in Mr. Harvey's apartment and has exhibited work in several spaces in the city, is the type of gallery—small, specialized and mobile—that we'll probably be seeing more of in the coming years. Mr. Harvey, formerly a director at the Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, is building a stable of living artists and artists' estates, many of them not household names. He is approaching gallery directing as a hands-on labor of love.
One of his current projects is a two-person exhibition of small plein-air landscapes by the relatively unknown Seymour Remenick (1923-1999) and his well-known student Stuart Shils (b. 1954). Most were painted in and around Philadelphia, sometimes side by side. Mr. Shils is represented here with paintings from the 1980s through 2009. His mature works—the pared-down landscapes built up out of broad planes of impastoed color—have always struck me as a little vague and impersonal. But Mr. Shils's roots are in Remenick, and his most satisfying paintings are earlier. The best of them, including the charming "River with Old Shipping Docks" (c. 1988), exude a sweet light and an economy reminiscent of Albert Marquet's water views. Remenick—with landscapes from the 1950s through the 1980s, on view here—steals the show. He channels qualities of Corot, Constable and the Dutch masters in a brushy, old-world, oil-sketch approach to nature that is uniquely, genuinely Romantic.
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Stuart Shils's paintings take as their subject the rural landscapes of Indiana,Vermont and County Mayo, Ireland. to capture shifting light and weather conditions, time of day and qualities of season. In an essay on the artist's work, Justin Spring writes,"These beautifully focused small works are intimate in scale, suggesting that they have been designed for domestic spaces.They are inspired by European art of nearly two centuries ago, but they partake in the contemporary dialogue of New York painting."
Stuart Shils studied at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Seymour Remenick and at the Philadelphia College of Art. Mr. Shils is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Ballinglen Arts Foundation Fellowship for Residency in Ballycastle, Ireland, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Writing of his work critic Maureen Mullarkey observed that "his landscapes dwell on the uncertain border between representation and abstraction; increasingly, they cross into pure suggestion. Landscape is inseparable from scenery; yet scenes all but dissolve. In their place is something more elusive, harder to evoke: the mood of a locale and the temper of its weather.With each successive show, Mr. Shils reveals himself as a poet of atmosphere."
Though specific to the locales in which he paints, Shils sees his work as an extended metaphor, a highly compressed meditation on form and light.
