Thursday, February 27, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Art: Let them see cake

By Gregory Crosby

Undoubtedly there are any number of technical terms, dread jargon from aesthetic theory, that could be tossed around in a discussion of the art of Angela Kallus. But they would be icing of a particularly icy sort for a visual and tactile confectionery that really boils down to a powerful yet simple metaphor for the response they evoke: cake. The joy is that Kallus' pieces, on display through March 8 in her Masters of Fine Art Thesis Exhibition at UNLV's Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, are a particularly multilayered cake; the rare kind that you can have and eat too.

I say "cake" because, on the most superficial level of response, Kallus' bas relief sculptures resemble a cake decorator gone wild with grandiose visions of a world where nature is in the frosting. Kallus' panels consist of fields of monochromatic or two-tone semi-translucent roses, each one resembling the plotz at the end of a frosting gun, sometimes combined with rippling swells of painted acrylic gel that instantly bring to mind the aesthetics of the pastry shop. In pieces such as "2701 Red Roses," they are an overpowering red, or red and orange as in the horizontal diptych "Cherry Tangerine." Or they are an unearthly pure black, boiling with those ridged curlicues. In "Mandarin Wave," a smear of black frosting bursts through the sunset and crimson of the surface like an oil stain rising through rice paper. It's very difficult to suppress an urge to extend a finger and draw it across this piece, a rich gob of dyed sugar to be popped in one's mouth.

But this aspect of a cake decorator on the quest for her magnum opus is defiantly undercut when the viewer realizes the virtuosity of the sculptor's skill. Kallus has painstakingly created each individual rosette, sculpting the landscape of pure color with enormous attention to detail. The frisson of recognizing the amount of craft that has been applied to sculptures so relentlessly airy, even frothy, is one of those layers mentioned above. It is in the tension between such an ephemeral sweetness and disciplined formal skill that the viewer lies in relation to Kallus' pieces. This is where their true "cakeness" lies; the way one is presented with an elaborate birthday cake, one that draws the stock, but literal phrase "It looks too good to eat." One sits there, wanting to slice it up, not wanting to slice it up, a moment of suspended desire more pleasurable than its consummation.

That's the sort of feeling Kallus' sculptures engender. They are undeniably lush, but it's a firmly controlled, perfectly directed lushness. When she turns from roses to her stunning portraits of chickens, each a noble rooster embodying one of the four seasons, she turns a hackneyed icon of a million country kitchens and rustic reveries into an eye-popping glamour puss. Each looks as if it was commissioned by the season itself: the white and baby blue wonderland of "Winter," the cock stepping proudly on a field of Crayola-green rosettes in "Spring," the bursting sunflowers of "Summer," the cramped and melancholy red and gold leaves tumbling down in "Autumn." It's as if '50s domestic kitsch were reinterpreted as heroic epic.

Such pieces are playful and intimidating, light yet vaguely unnatural, rather like the coal eyes of the four traditional sculptures in the show, the "Snowmen." Created from cast resin and flocked like Christmas trees, each is a sparkling white cherub that wouldn't be out of place on a tacky outdoor fountain, except for their small, pointed carrot noses and coal black eyes. Their expressions are joyful while their eyes have that deadness that only man-made things can have. They struck me as exactly the sort of magical characters in a fairy tale who would lead you to freeze to death under the guise of being their beloved playmate. They are very different from the wall sculptures, but connected to the same impulse, a lovely distancing that nevertheless draws the viewer in. Like the big fat flower on your slice of the birthday cake, you want to devour it and keep it pristine all at once. Each layer of Kallus' art is richer and more surprising than the last.