Visual art review from Winston-Salem Journal, Sunday, Oct. 7, 2001

WINGS AND FIERCE WIND

High Point show is apowerful trip exploring life and death and faith

by Tom Patterson / Special to the Journal

HIGH POINT--As suggested by the title of his solo exhibition at the Theatre

Art Galleries--"Theology"--Scott Eagle's art is about the big issues: life,

death and their relationship to a larger spiritual reality. In his 33 paintings,

prints and other works on paper here, he takes a variety of approaches to

those issues, combining contemporary imagery with images drawn from a wide range

of spiritual, mythological and related art-historical traditions.

The exhibit's title, of course, refers to the study of the nature of God,

or of religious truth. That's also the title of the letterpress print that

serves as a kind of introduction to the show. Rendered in the technically

refined, meticulously realistic--in some cases surrealistic--style that's

characteristic of Eagle's work, it's a portrait of a balding, professorial-looking man

with heavily wrinkled skin, set off against a bleak, deforested landscape of

sawed-off tree stumps stretching back to the horizon.

In his hands, this theologian holds an unfolded sheet of paper containing

a series of eight illustrations that show how to make a mock bird of folded

paper, in the Japanese origami tradition. Meanwhile, he appears oblivious to

the actual bird perched atop his head. The image serves as an apt metaphor for

our inability to fully comprehend ultimate reality through rational,

intellectual models, and of the absence of a hospitable environment for such reality in

modern society.

Here, as in a number of the show's other works, Eagle (how appropriate

his name is) uses bird imagery in the same way it's employed in many religious

traditions--as an emblem of flight from the eartly, physical realm into that of

the spirit. Additional examples include several pieces that reference the

Greek myth of Daedelus and his son, Icarus, who fashioned a pair of wings with

which he unsuccessfully attempted to soar into the heavens and join the gods.

Particularly striking among these are two companion portraits of a

fresh-faced young man, The Dream of Icarus and Icarus with a Bird. In the former,

blue-tinged acrylic drawing, he holds an origami paper bird in one hand, while

in the latter, red-splattered one, he lowers his eyes and gently caresses a

realistically rendered dove. In contrast to the myth's portrayal of Icarus as an

arrogant human aspirant to divine power, Eagle portrays him as a serenely

noble soul whose aim is selfless transcendence.

A far more dramatic emblem of transcendence is found in Eagle's

Meditation #3, painted on two canvases adjoined one atop the other. In the lower

canvas, a flayed, bluish humanoid figure stands in a water-filled boat made of

bricks--an appropriate symbol of earthbound existence. His upward-gazing face wears

an expression of transcendent awe, and the top of his head is crowned by a

glowing, white aura. His outstretched arms appear to be transforming before our

eyes into a pair of large, upward-curving wings, reminiscent of those in

traditional images of the mythical Phoenix.

The transformation taking place in this lower canvas culminates in the

upper one, in which the man's glowing head is surmounted by a disembodied eye

surrounded by an equilateral triangle--the emblem of divine, all-knowing wisdom.

Emerging upward from this traditional symbol is a majestic, dark gray tornado

that expands upward and outward to virtually fill the canvas. It's a potent

emblem of the powerful, seemingly capricious forces of nature, and it's

also--like Eagle's birds--associated with flight, since such severe windstorms pluck

objects from the earth and hurl them airborne. Overall, this painting is a

forceful expression of the concept of spiritual transfiguration in the wake of

earthly suffering.

The format of this painting and semblances of its content are echoed in

an adjacent group of three much smaller, narrow, mixed-media panel paintings

from a series titled "Prayer." In the lower sections of two of them numbered 1

and 2, the flayed figure in Metamorphosis #3 is replaced by partially obscured,

collaged images of screaming figures from Picasso's famous painting, Guernica

, about the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.

In Prayer #1(ITAL), the upraised, gaping mouth of the central figure

spouts a fiery red, abstract-expressionist flame whose general shape and position

echo those of the tornado in the previously described work, while the same

figure in #2(ITAL) screams out a similarly loose, expressionistic, cloudlike form

in shades of skylike blue. In both of these works--which also comment on the

shift from European to American modernism after World War II--Eagle envisions

prayer as the terrified, incoherent screams of individuals undergoing profound

pain and suffering.

In the third numbered piece in the "Prayer" series, he has collaged an

image of Christ's legs and pierced feet from a classical Crucifixion image

against the lower of two abstract-expressionist panels, with the upper half of

Christ's body replaced by an image that suggests both a tornado and a burning

flame, signifying both intense pain and the spiritual transformation of a

suffering, dying body.

The most dramatic of Eagle's works that employ tornado images are two

large paintings prominently displayed side by side in the High Point show. In one

of these, titled I Am That, a massive funnel cloud that looms over a tiny

house on a low, black horizon spins off a series of narrower funnel clouds, one

of which appears to emerge directly from the roof of the little house. In the

other, Faith #2, a smiling, wall-eyed, naked infant with red hair lies on his

back in the lower foreground of a symmetrically patterned, green field, looking

upward at the whorling blue-gray clouds that appear to emerge from the top of

the twisting funnel cloud bearing down on this child. It's an apt metaphor

for the fearless innocence and vulnerability of total faith.

In addition to the previously discussed Prayer #3, several other works

here center on appropriated and partially transformed images from classical

Christian art. One of these is Mask, centering on a torn-in-half image of a figure

who appears to be an amalgam of Christ and Adolf Hitler wearing a crown of

thorns. Another is the exquisite Annunciation, which consists of two adjoining,

side-by-side panels. Collaged onto the right edge of the leftmost, otherwise

abstract-expressionist panel in fiery shades of red, an image of a gold-haloed

angel, taken from a reproduction of an illuminated manuscript from Europe's

Middle Ages, gazes serenely at the more heavily textured, green-hued

abstract-expressionist panel at the right.

The works discussed above amount to only one-third of an exhibition

largely composed of works that are equally strong from an aesthetic standpoint and

equally compelling in their content. In the radically changed world in which

we've found ourselves in the last month, some works of art have lost a

considerable amount of relevance. Eagle's are not among these. His High Point show is

richly rewarding, thought-provoking and well worth seeing before it closes on

Oct. 27.