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A Sketch In Time
When the Tribeca artist looks at a flower, he doesn’t merely see a beautiful object, still and leaning against the rim of a vase. He sees a body in motion, set in a steady march through time, space, and its own life cycle. A glimpse of that vision can be seen for an hour each day at Cheryl Pelavin Fine Arts Gallery as Janz documents the blossoming and, ultimately, the death of a single flower by way of an enlarged charcoal sketch he calls “Blooming” on one of the gallery walls.
“I’m constantly adjusting it, and as I adjust it, the drawing becomes denser and more expressive, and more abstract,” said Janz, 74, gesturing with a charcoal smeared hand. “By the time I get to day five, you begin to see motion. In order to cope with the changes [in the flower], I’ve had to build up these layers, and it reveals the inner life, which is in all things.” As if the drawing weren’t enough to engage the eye, Janz himself becomes part of the piece. His own movement within the production has a volley-and-serve rhythm to it, a bit like watching a tennis match. At its conclusion, Janz said the process is an illustration of the way of the natural world: of overlapping life cycles interacting with and propelling one another. “In the end,” he said, “the erasure is the last traces of the flower dying, and it leaves a visual aroma, so to speak.” In more ways than one, Janz’s performance—an expression he’s been tinkering with since 1980—is paradoxical.
“Art can’t do reality, but what it can do is suggest that things can live on,” Janz said. “It can’t be real, but it can certainly be expressive of our understanding of time, and of aging.” Having been a friend and fan of Janz’ for seven years, Pelavin said she was thrilled to finally feature him in her gallery, where he is showing mixed media sculptures and acrylic paintings. But she was apprehensive when Janz first presented the idea of adding the performance piece as a means of attracting more visitors to the exhibit. “All I could think of was charcoal dust on the floor, and charcoal dust in the lights,” Pelavin said. “But we never say no to an artist. And as the show’s gone on, we’ve been able to relax and say, ‘What the hell, let’s just have fun with this.’ And people love it, they really do. They’ll come in one day and watch him make these sketches, and then come back the next day with their children and their husbands and take pictures.”
The sculptures—animals and figurines made of bits and pieces of wood and other assorted materials Janz has been finding near his Duane Street studio since he first took up residence there in 1979—in a sense are constructed entirely from pieces of Tribeca, according to the artist. Purposefully crude and deeply evocative of cave and rock drawings, Janz said the sculptures are an ode to the world’s first artists and a requiem for the time before art became an enterprise. “I’m not really interested in art,” Janz said. “Art is just another career choice. I’m interested in the creative imagination trying to cope with this strange thing called reality. I tried to go back to the source.” Pelavin Fine Arts, 13 Jay St. Open Tuesday–Saturday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday by appointment. 212-925-9424, cherylpelavin.com.
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