T. L. Solien

Over the past twenty-five years, T. L. Solien has given pictorial form to the mawkishness of human erring. This harrowing and self-deprecating feat is elegantly demonstrated in this survey exhibition, comprising image-laden canvases and a selection of works on paper. Madison-based Solien has become adept at composing impeccable, doleful narratives founded on a basic lexicon of signs, symbols, and tropes that range from the exotic to the mundane. Coloring-book kittens, fish heads, self-portraits, three-eyed ghosts, and Norwegian oxen secure their roles as metaphors in Solien’s disquieting orbit of still lifes, landscapes, and portraiture.

With a breathy visual vocabulary and deft brushwork, Solien integrates graphic elements with passages of painterly zeal and crude trompe l’oeil effects. His reach is best illustrated in Sap, 2006, a large canvas that deservingly occupies the gallery’s entrance wall. Though it unabashedly carries overtones of Donald Baechler’s heavy, leaden contours, as well as of 1980s pastiche painting, Sap is so much more than the sum of its appropriated parts. Generic totems, hanging socks, a reference to a Jean Dubuffet sculpture, a crucifix, and a whale-shaped club dangling from a mechanical female doll anoint a warm interior space that is familiar yet imaginary. With the mark of a good storyteller, Solien pulls viewers into his simultaneously naive and bookish pictures by commingling bits of lowbrow imagery with literary associations. Teaming forlorn narratives with Solien’s painting conceit, “Myths & Monsters” is a dark existential ride.