"Facts and Fictions" - Domont Studio Gallery - April 30, 2003 - 3 1/2 stars

Facts and Fictions: Harry and Lois Davis

Harry and Lois Davis, married for 55 years, exhibit their stylistically different works together with wonderful and not surprising success. 

Lois tastefully tackles social issues in her imaginative, figurative works with lilaclike pastel hues. "Traditions: After a Holiday," a diptych of pre-Christmas sale shopping and post-Christmas returns, shows a funny, but all too true scene of folks relatively void of holiday spirit rushing anxiously to buy now just to take it unsentimentally back. "The Children Die: Winter Enters Our Hearts" is powerfully sad as parents bury their children in the foreground, while havoc plays out behind. 

Harry's paintings of buildings familiar to any Indianapolis denizen are amazing. There is no painter locally who is technically comparable or as eloquent. Using acrylic on masonite, paint is thinly and deftly dappled in careful (more like accomplished) layers, creating a beautiful illusion of reality. The texture is super smooth, opaque and tactile, so much so that you can't tell the works on canvas from those on masonite. You can see every brick in the painting of "Coulter Flats," located at 2100 Meridian. The orange-red roof catches noonday sun and contrasts perfectly with the teal sky. Through June 7, 2003; (317) 685-9634

NUVO Newsweekly, April 30 - May 7, 2003

Page 27

Mary Lee Pappas

"The Human Form Divine" Antonio Criscimagna - John Domont Gallery - May 31, 2001 - 4 stars

Antonio Criscimagna's debut consists of figurative works. Criscimagna is a creator, rather than painter. Adrenalin and instinct make these unplanned paintings about basic human intimacy and companionship very effective, some more than others. 

He produces large, untitled paintings (most in the range of 60-inches-by-42-inches) in a hunter-gatherer vein, foraging for paint tubes in his boiler room studio cave. Thick layers of black acrylic paint frame stark grey and white nude human forms. The simple effect is eerie and calm. 

Criscimagna doesn't use models, and so his figures are gutteral and take on earthy forms. Soft lines, abstract proportions, and featureless oval heads all recall a rhythmic, organic, Old Stone Age sophistication, yet elegantly convey contemporary beauty and man/woman/earth unity. The 2000 A.D. angular bodies look chiseled from stone, vaguely reminiscent of Cycladic marble idols c. 2000 B.C. Two biblically themed pieces push his human abstractions to obvious Picasso proportions. 

Overlapping shapes energetically engulf each other to perfectly portray Eve emerging from Adam's rib. Distorted lines create the readily recognizable story in an effective modern icon manner. 

Through June 30, 2001; (317) 685-9634.

NUVO Newsweekly, May 31 - June 7, 2001

Page 23

Mary Lee Pappas