COVER STORY :: DECEMBER 01, 2004

Bending the world with magic realism

By LAWRENCE COSENTINO

‘The Magic Realism of Rob Gonsalves’
On display through December at Saper Galleries, 433 Albert Ave. in downtown East Lansing. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mon.-Wed. and Fri.-Sat., 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thur. and 1 to 4 p.m. on First Sunday. Schools and other groups are invited to contact the gallery at (517) 351-0815 for additional information.Imagination is a great leveler. Any 7-year-old girl can sink a tin-can Titanic or crush the moon with her thumb. It’s the poor, cowering grown-ups — the ones supposedly running things — who need basic lessons in mastering reality.

The rediscovery of childhood mind games is the substance of Saper Gallery’s biggest exhibition of the year, devoted to the illusionist art or “magic realism” of Rob Gonsalves.

A former architect who lives and works in Ontario, Gonsalves has become a specialist in vibrantly colored visual puns usually based on naïve ideas like clouds that turn into sailing ships or sunflowers with faces.

It sounds simplistic, and in some ways it is. But the theme of empowerment by imagination is the crimson thread that binds the 67 Gonsalves prints collected at Saper with their fascinated fans. It’s a force with wide appeal, and not one to be dismissed lightly.

‘House by the Railroad’ (top) and ‘Ladies of the Lake ’ (bottom) by Rob Gonsalves, on display through December at Saper Galleries in East Lansing.

In Gonsalves’ vision, imagination is a constructive force, not a quaint escape into fields of unicorns and fairies. In “Table Top Towers,” for example, a foreground city of toy building blocks blends seamlessly into a massive full-scale skyline. The trick is that the toy and real buildings both rise from a cleverly placed picnic table that lines up perfectly with the horizon, making it impossible to distinguish one city from the other. A boy hangs from a tree overhead, putting the capstone on both cities. This is no mere visual gag; under the surface illusion is a mental Mobius strip showing the organic link between childhood fantasy and adult civilization.

Gonsalves has been compared to masters of visual illusion M.C. Escher and Rene Magritte, two artists he acknowledges had a big influence on him. Gonsalves’ world, however, is a lot brighter than Escher’s and less fraught with provocative, arbitrary symbols than Magritte’s.

Imagine, if possible, the exacting, math-professor surrealism of Escher dragged into a gingham-and-pie world of fluffy clouds and flying children. It’s an odd mix of honey and codeine — a broad-daylight, highly saleable dream world that has made Gonsalves a hot property in the art market since the early ‘90s.

Already, the Saper show has grabbed a much wider variety of viewers than most exhibits, with young children and school kids among the most enthusiastic. When Saper brought in a group of elderly residents from the Burcham Hills Retirement Center, they, too, were fascinated.

Much of the show is an open invitation to conspire in brazen acts of illusion. “Change of Scenery,” set on the shore of a remote northern lake, depicts a young man festooning his hearth-lit log cabin with curtains. The cloth is cut in such a way that the negative space around it forms a completely convincing cityscape, turning a firmament of northern Canadian stars turn into so many big-city lights.

Many of the pictures hinge on an artfully feathered visual fold where one world blends into another. A cozy wooden library floor, for example, morphs into the dark forest from which it was built. Other illusions take a spiral form, drawing the viewer into the illusion as if into a whirlpool. A group of children put together a jigsaw puzzle of a mansion, escaping the puzzle room to climb the steps of the two-dimensional house. They diminish in perspective as they go, finally popping out of the second-floor window with outsized pieces of jigsaw sky to finish the job.

Perhaps the most ambitious canvas of the lot is “On the Upswing,” which does a triple riff on the dizzying heights of a tree-hung swing. Piles of leaves become trees, picket fences become brownstones, and the patch of park below the swingers telescopes upward to three distinct levels. (The kids in this picture, like most of Gonsalves’ figures, are clumsy and foreshortened, but that only makes it easier for viewers to project themselves into their world.)

Despite some painfully literal clichés (pine trees fog into cathedrals; books open into fantasy worlds), many of Gonsalves’ images show surprising depth. One striking image, “Here Comes the Flood,” hints that the power of imagination has a powerful political vector. A winding European-style street seems to be inundated with water. Upon closer inspection, the flood — complete with reflections of buildings overhead — turns out to be painted on placards carried by townspeople marching down the street, which is perfectly dry. The image is too weird to be good clean fun; it smells more like postmodern revolution.

Another piece with unexpected depths, “House by the Railroad” offers Gonsalves’ artistic manifesto by turning the empowerment equation the other way round. A young boy plays with a model train in a gloomy, dark house, unaware that a real locomotive, riding the same toy track, is bearing down on him from behind. The inevitability of manhood — and its sexuality, if you’re inclined to view trains that way — is a dark and terrible thing here. (Most kids in Gonsalves’ world swing and jump and fly like Peter Pan over cozy quilts that morph into storybook fields.)

“Railroad” is also a tribute to an artist as far from Gonsalves’ sensibility as could be, stark American realist Edward Hopper. To cinch the nod toward bleak reality, Hopper’s own “House by the Railroad” hangs on the wall behind the boy. It’s the perfect way for Gonsalves to explain to the academic art police his decision to follow the hollow brick road. “I know all about this sad-lady-in-the-window stuff,” he seems to say here, “but it’s not my thing. I prefer to go out and play.”

It’s a commercial exhibit, to be sure, but gallery owner Roy Saper doesn’t seem to mind pleasing people. He says he doesn’t even look at the bona fides of the hundreds of artists who aspire to a full-scale show in his space. “We don’t care about their awards, their degrees, where they’ve showed in the past,” he says. “All we care about is whether we love it or not.” A lot of people have been agreeing with Saper on this one.