Tory Folliard Gallery - Concrete ideas frame Aho's wispy impermanence

By MARY LOUISE SCHUMACHER for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May 4, 2007

The world itself seems to bend a little in the hands of landscape artist Eric Aho, whose work is on view at the Tory Folliard Gallery.

The loose chunks of ice may be breaking up over dark water and the snowy earth beyond may be going soft with the sun in "January Floes," but Aho countermands all of this by bending the scene almost imperceptibly, like the curvature of the Earth, giving it a taut and unnervingly dramatic feel.

"Floes," not unlike the tradition of panorama painting, seems to imply something more infinite than can be contained in its frame, where the land is bulging with its own force and energy.

In "Scattering October Clouds," an odd little painting that I loved right away for its thick, gooey sky, Aho gives the clouds more heft than the arching, grassy pastures and sloping hills below. And this is what Aho does - flips our expectations.

Merengue-like clouds seem to hang creamy and light in "Ballyglass Emerging Beneath a Flesh-Like Sky," though their substance upstages the green, wispy, Irish landscape seen from a bird's-eye view, too.

In works like "North Side" and "1770 House," Aho uses a high noon-like all-over light.

With it, the natural give of the scene is flattened out, transforming the side of a house, the angle of a roof, the incline of a yard, a shaft of shadow or a window reflection into austere geometric forms and give the paintings an abstract, modern appearance.

It's the kind of light that makes the foreground in "White Façade" a buttery, honey-like wall of paint that stands still, flat and out front, pushing up against the picture frame, making its unusual texture known.

The white house, the presumed subject of the painting, on the other hand, is cut off above the roof line and has a wispy impermanence, like something you only glimpse from a car window, driving by.

As precise as the compositions seem to be, Aho also paints plein air, outside, and his varied and unusual brushstrokes have a spontaneous quickness that seems to contradict the careful planning.

The brushwork also creates textures that mystify, such as the delicate, crystalline feel of the paint that seems to unfurl like a pillowy blanket in "Bullock Farm" in innumerable shades of pinks and whites.

As if to remind us that this is the point, the subject of his painting, Aho leaves little context in the foreground and shoves the saturated greens of a flock of trees and the stark red of a barn high up in the painting, concentrated above the horizon line.

Click here to view Eric Aho's paintings.