The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia was founded to showcase and document Georgia artists.
Rewarding mature, productive practitioners with solo exhibitions is one way that it fulfills its mission. Scott Belville, as is evident from the beautifully crafted, eerie and compelling drawings and paintings in “Trust,” is a worthy recipient.
The Georgia native and University of Georgia professor is known for what you might call Southern magic realism. Rendered in a naturalistic manner, his interiors or landscapes are stage sets on which characters -- simultaneously familiar and strange -- engage in mysterious, open-ended narratives.
The 19 drawings and prints in Belville’s “Curbside “series are all variations on “Drive-by,” a 2004 painting. Set in what could be the outskirts of a Georgia town, these works appear to be stream-of -consciousness musings on life’s passing show.
A bulldozer in the background suggests encroaching development. Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart and former President George W. Bush make appearances. Most references are enigmatic. One would be hard-pressed to discern, for example, that the fire blazing in a barrel (or from a barbecue grill), which appears in every variation, is his oblique reference to the Twin Towers terrorist attack, the impetus for the original painting.
The feelings of vulnerability and impotence the attacks created seem to drive, as well, the post-apocalyptic landscapes of Belville’s “Flood/Drought” series. Their proportions and shallow perspective suggest a predella, the lower panel of the Renaissance altarpieces Belville studies during his annual summer teaching gig in Cortona, Italy.
Even more sparsely populated than the “Curbside” landscapes, these richly detailed and subtly tinted naturalistic drawings suggest Cormac McCarthy’s bleak novel “The Road.”
The mood lightens in “Identities With Animals,” six oil portraits of individuals and the pet cats who resemble them, right down, in some cases, to multiple eyes. Belville revels in the act of painting here, using a palette of vivid colors and a variety of brushstrokes.
These pieces stand at the comic end of the "Children" series, a wry rogue's gallery of untrustworthy people: judges, investment advisers, fortune-tellers and gamblers -- a pox Americana, if you will, whose often weird physical characteristics are at odds with the prim Victorian-style cameos.
Paradoxical impulses link the three bodies of work. On one hand, there’s the disappointment in and concern about the state of the world and its inhabitants. On the other, there’s his obvious pleasure in the act of creation and the hope that act represents. (And what about the nude pregnant woman in one of the “Flood/Drought” drawings? Might she be the new Eve in an Eden yet to be imagined?)
This is an artist who asks questions, values craft and clearly spends a lot of time in the studio. He trusts his viewers, if not humanity in general, to engage his art and make their own meaning. Belville might serve as a role model for the young artists of “Movers and Shakers,” on view in the adjacent galleries.
Catherine Fox is chief visual arts critic at www.artscriticatl.com.
Art review
“Trust: New Works by Scott Belville.”
Through March 19. $5; $1, students & seniors; free for members and U.S. military with ID. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays. The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, 75 Bennett St., A2, Atlanta. 404-367-4542, www.mocaga.org.
Bottom line: Thoughtful, weird and beautifully wrought ponderings on the state of the world.
