Mark Messersmith's "paintings can be seen as an ... iridescent cacophony of theatrical landscapes. With the philosophical concern for the altering Florida environment, Messersmith stages perplexing combinations of intrusive man made constructs like telephone poles and logging trucks in tandem with the flora and fauna of the native environment meeting in symbolical chaos. These are modern myths, dark illuminations of a fading wilderness. Perhaps the result of Messersmith's interest in illuminated manuscripts, appendages frame these works that act as vignettes embellishing the hidden narratives in each work.
-Janis Karam Gallo
Florida Painting
It's hard to have an up-beat conversation with a Last Judgement prophet or anyone with a whiff of sulphur and brimstone about them. Dour figures waving end-of-the-world signs might be colorful street theater, but they are deadly at the box office. We enjoy Hogarth's rakes progressing inexorably to hell and Rowlandson's grim reaper harrowing his moral degenerates because the artists have left us behind on the winning team. Mark Messersmith knows that if you can't smile compassionately at human foibles in this fading century, nobody learns anything - so he has modernized the medieval dance of death. A stranger in an admittedly strange land, he incorporates images that are so much a part of our regional landscape that we have ceased to wonder at them. His fresh perspective gives us vivid depictions of Southern vernacular - like brutally clear-cut stands of timber burning as wastelands in the heat of the night. Our exotic Florida birds and vipers become symbolic opponents, centrally placed on canvases iridescent with color. Dark deeds are done by dark figures in the gleam of eerie headlights. Dead deer litter the highways while glutted hunters take roadkill trophies or slaughter game for sport. Then, like a gentle refrain in the predella boxes, Messersmith repeats Masaccio's Expulsion from Paradise, Adam and Eve covering the nakedness they never felt until they ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge. To his canvases the artist attaches carved pediments of creatures sometimes real -- wild hares, alligators, herons and sometimes mythical. These three-dimensional elements are juxtaposed with reproductions of saints and sinners from hagiographical manuscripts, photo essays on rain forests, and paintings of southern yard art. Although this grand cacophony of objects and points of view creates a narrative for the viewer to read, nothing that the artist has assembled or affixed really competes with the brilliance of his painting. Messersmith favors high contrasts and lush pigments -- phthalocyanine blues, greens, crimsons -- building luminous or lurid transitions of light and dark. He is a master of pyrotechnics: those controlled burns of forest lands fascinate him as much as deadwood swamps at dawn and at dusk. In a natural evolution of his own imagery, he has moved from studio morte nature, in which the landscape is in a subordinate pictorial plane, to memento mori miniatures flanking major landscapes. The conflagration of pines makes pointed contrast to circus posters or fabricated (or appropriated) billboard advertisements for wayside shrines, tattoo parlors, palm readers, and brands of vine-ripened tomatoes. In the midst of a true paradise, the artist satirizes the ephemeral promises of a commercial paradise at the very next roadside attraction. Nothing is exempt from his appraisal of the imperfection of human nature or of human dreaming: the Sandman Motel will forever beckon with one neon letter burned out. Messersmith's danse macabre is the most sane and least despairing of criticisms, revealing our hypocrisies but suggesting we still might share in knowledge and hope for improvement in the next millennium.
- Allys Palladine-Craig
Director,
Museum of Fine Arts,
Florida State University
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