D.J. Hall Review

I’m delighted to announce that my guest reviewer has made a full recovery from her surgery and, like I promised you, has provided me with a splendid review of the current exhibit at Koplin Del Rio Gallery showing the recent works of the artist D.J. Hall, which I have included for you here.

I received an invitation from my favorite gallery owner, Eleana Del Rio, to a private artist reception for D.J., so I took advantage of this opportunity by inviting Caron to join me.  I had already seen one of her exhibits, probably her 2005 exhibit at Koplin Del Rio when the Gallery was on Robertson Blvd., but failed at that time to really appreciate the depth of her endeavors or realize that I was seeing a part of a lifelong project. Women, often middle aged with or without kids splashing around, usually but not always lounging at a pool, more often than not in Palm Springs, is the meat of her work and crisp realistically rendered, brightly colored high contrast lighting are the potatoes of her work. Now, after seeing the current show and the catalog of her thirty-five year concurrent retrospective showing at the Palm Springs Art Museum, I think I see the light, at least more light.

So before I turn things over to Caron’s far more visceral review of D. J.’s paintings I would like to bring up a point.  Most of her women, casually dressed in elegant 1950 wear, appear glitzy and shallow, you know, the Mrs. Robertson type that young men like me need to be extra wary of lest they be eaten alive. But then I read D.J.’s biography in her retrospective catalog written by Katherine Plake Hough, chief curator of the museum, and realize that what I was cognizing came from my brain and background. I now understand that most of the images I was seeing sprang from D.J.’s childhood all the way to the present and it all had a lot to do with her personal fantasies, dreams, hopes, fears, hurts, sorrows, joys and longings; she was not simply a voyeur bystander recording vapid females soaking up rays, splashing water and sipping booze for want of anything else to do, much is going on under the hood. Is this not one of the hallmarks of an accomplished figurative artist, especially one who places the figure in a narrative situation and makes sure not to leave the viewer with all of the answers to the visuals but always manages to include some measure of mystery and ambiguity? I think so. On to Caron’s fabulous review:

“Remember the Red Balloon? Gray scales paint the cloudy Parisian skies with wet streets while the lollipop-red, helium-filled, floating concoction blots the ironic cityscapes? The ending still moves me as the gang turns against the boy’s heart as its dimpled latex descends, as if bloodied, to his feet but then a bounty of balloons come to his rescue, lifting him high into turquoise tomorrows. One could say that walking the streets of LA on a Thursday afternoon has that same monotone tweed color stitched ruthlessly across the panorama until the doors open upon the rainbow realm of D.J. Hall at the Koplin del Rio Gallery splashing color in one’s face from pools deep with desire and satire.

Hall is no novice. She is spinning the reception in a vintage dress straight from her featured painting and radiating good fortune. Hall is a striking blonde, an archetype, married to an architect, living on the canals in Venice, CA and who recently purchased another home in Palm Springs. Art can be liberating financially, flowering forth one’s own middle-aged femme fatale by ignoring the drone of “poor” artist syndrome. Receptions are deceptions. Behind this quintessential Hall perfection one detects the tremors of womanhood’s shadowy seductions and betrayals. There is also the knowledge that Hall is no tender to gender wielding her well-oiled brushes with brash boldness, breaking down barriers consistently.

Her subjects are primarily savvy, sun-drenched women and this show is no exception. As a child in the 50’s hard liquor on the rocks was the norm for the worn out father coming home promptly at 5:30, waiting for dinner to be served at the family table. Hall’s paintings feature sexy martinis in the hands of well-manicured females who are permanently on real or imagined vacations, seemingly independent of family, who have all the time in the world. Her models are modern, everyday divas who don’t wash dishes and often surround themselves with retro decor and dress. Shifting the paradigm that harkens to past cocktail parties where ladies served men with a smile to women glinting at men from a canvas, holding beckoning drinks and taking center stage. The watery pool side image serves as both a literal and figurative reflective, adding a calm eeriness, the need to submerge one’s past, present and/or future.

By featuring the female Hall pedestals her but not without irony. “I’ve Gotta Secret” has two, very dressy women, outside a glassed-in house whispering, shoeless by the pool. No one is around them and yet they are enrapt with each other as if pubescent school girls on a busy playground. A second look gives the viewer another recessed figure, alone inside that glass menagerie, a woman talking on the phone. Here we pause and sip the scene. Who are the two on the outside? Both friends of the one on the inside? Are they empathizing with the forlorn female or are they relishing in her dilemma with gossip? Is the woman on the phone receiving disappointing news or has she just slipped inside to feverishly call a lover while her partner is away? The Flemish finish of photographic-like precision keeps one’s eye on the canvas, steering through it smoothly, appreciating technique while caressing the question of what Hall is saying to and about women.

Her canvases and panels are full of Crest-white smiles that at once seem seductive, if not forced. One imagines then that these women are stealth-fully calculating in their mature, demure black, one-piece swimsuits. They engage us in their air of relaxed royalty but their Onasis shades cover their common complexity. Are their faces cages that keep them trapped into a society of niceties, even to each other, hiding jealousy, betrayal and/or hate? Or are they trapping undecided drifters both within and without their social status, advantageously with a swirl of the tart olive? Their role is decidedly not the weaker sex as they might have been told when growing up. Dialing numbers keeps them well-connected to friends, lovers and family but at a safe distance for ultimate control.

The lone phone in the hand of the society lady with her back to the viewer in “Chat” has a touch of sorrow, uncertainty, isolation in a world where all physical needs are met and the martini glass sits on the table at a distance, untouched. There is a wistfulness that appears in “Full Circle” that begs you to consider this painted woman’s life, seated in a shimmer of blues, reflecting both the lit pool and the darkening evening sky with averted eyes. “Hot Night” grabs your attention with the rear view of a woman in red but her stance seems too precarious at the very edge of the pool in a dress with a drink, at the deep end. Men and women viewing meticulous renderings of well-heeled stories will dive in and sink then swim to the surface, breathing in the ominous oxygen of Hall’s varied, visceral, vain vixens who are also the victims of their own vices, surviving. Listen to the tinkling of dry martini glasses toasting yet another stellar show by an artist who knows how to work the sober studio…in paradoxical pants.”

…Caron G. Rand’s thoughts on D. J. Hall’s artwork

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