Surreal Estates

By: Josef Woodland
February 2005
Santa Barbara News-Press


Looking at the strangely lean spaces and clean, angular views in the paintings of Armin Mühsam, now at the Atkinson Gallery at Santa Barbara City College, one name leaps to mind: Giorgio de Chirico. Like protosurrealist de Chirico, Mühsam relishes the interaction of peculiar structures and shadows, and of geometries laid out on enigmatic grids and odd landscapes.

Also like de Chirico, Mühsam - who studied in Germany and the United States and is now based in Missouri - creates art relating to the realm of dreams as much as to concrete reality.

The artist piques our interest even as he artfully frustrates our understanding of what we're actually looking at. He relies on a visual vocabulary of building-block forms, mazes, foundations for unexplained buildings and other ersatz works-in-progress.

The show's title, "Constructed Landscapes," relates most directly to the painting in the "Landscape Model" series. In this piece, a miniature landscape tableau, like something from an elaborate model train layout, is propped up on sawhorses and adorned with primary colored streamers. A wash of sky and clouds is painted on the wall behind it, toying with our sense of reality and contextual reference, in a Magritte-like way.

These paintings may appear to be blueprints or work studies, but, in fact, serve as destinations and declarations. But we're happily duped, lured into the artist's clean and confident aesthetic flair.

"Project for a River," for instance, consists of diptychs with one panel deliberately left unfinished, and celebrating that very lack of finish. The six paintings in the "Foundation" series depict mysterious naked walls in a generic green hillside setting. The floor design differs slightly in each piece, like variations on a musical theme with no clear beginning or ending.

We seem to find more of a definable "there there" (to quote Gertrude Stein's comment about Oakland) in "After Klenze," referring to 19th-century neo-classical German architect Leo von Klenze. And yet its skeletal structure built into a hillside is similarly elusive. Puffy clouds hover overhead and a dirt road wends its way toward the polymorphic structure, but no clear motive announces itself. Muhsatn appears to recognize that architecture without motive can be scary.

However much he inserts irrational angles into his painting, Mühsam also maintains a sense of order on his own terms. The painting called "Signorelli's Tree" is another scenario set up on hobby horses, as if to suggest the touch of the enlightened hobbyist. Long de Chirico shadows creep around the picture and a lean tree lurks with a quiet grace in the distance.

All the pieces and geometric elements are organized with a neatness and calculation extending beyond the, generally messy world we inhabit. That's where the artist's artistic otherworldliness fits in, convincing us that the not-quite-real "constructed landscapes" contain their own truths.