One person might look at Nathan Lewis’ artworks and see one thing. Another might see another thing. Even a third person might see a third thing.
Lewis laughs when he thinks about all the layers of hidden meaning in his paintings. He piles symbolism onto metaphor onto allegory, gives his paintings texts and titles from Wallace Stevens, Kafka or Nietzsche, drops in references from history and popular culture such as Laurel and Hardy, Al Jolson and Fred Astaire and lets viewers lead the way with their own interpretations.
“Some pictures I go in with a firm understanding and some just some understanding,” he said. “I am grappling with it philosophically and it takes so much time to deal with that the meaning turns over during the course of the painting.”
Lewis is the newest artist represented by the Fernando Luis Alvarez Gallery in Stamford, and the art space is welcoming him with a one-man show. The title of the show, “Light is the Lion that Comes Down to Drink,” from a Stevens poem, even can be read a variety of ways.
Take, for example, his painting, “Till We Find the Blessed Isles Where Our Friends Are Dwelling,” whose title is from Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” On the surface, it’s a contemporary riff on Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s legendary 1851 painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” The “purple mountain majesties” in the background reference “America, the Beautiful.”
In Lewis’ rendition, the boat full of adults and children, young men and women, whites and minorities. The Washington figure is an Asian woman in a pantsuit who holds a tiny oil derrick in her hand. The boat’s anchor is an oil can. The American flag flies upside down, distress signal-style. An old man on the shore points the travelers in the right direction.
“It’s all tied in with the American dream. Is this the same America I live in now? … Leutze was painting an America that was fighting for independence. That is established now. But as a nation we like cars, and oil is what we are dependent on,” he said, regarding the oil references. But he adds that the painting is also about leaving childhood behind, which is why the old man is not in the boat. “Youth has to find a place to go,” he said.
His painting “Orange is the Sky” shows an old, gnarled tree covered with winter snow against an autumnal orange background and surrounded by people traipsing by. Some of the people walk stooped, others upright. None look at the tree, which is hanging, Christmas-ornament style, with a variety of artifacts: African ritual items, WWI-era mechanical devices, the skeleton of a Neanderthal man.
“”The human figures walk by consumed with their own lives, not paying attention to the tree, even though they might learn something from it,” said Lewis, a Seymour resident who teaches at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield. “The tree has been around longer than the people have. The tree is in a different season of its life.”
That same sense of a loss of what the past has to teach us also can be seen in Lewis’ series centering on abandoned factories he finds throughout Connecticut. “I’ve always liked these kind of spaces. They have a sense of history, of a thriving industry that is no longer here,” he said. “They are these wide, expansive spaces, but no one uses them. … They end up being these moments in time, moments of actual spaces that’ll never look like that again.”
The buildings are in a state of collapse, while rain and snow blow in through holes in the walls and ceilings. “The light in these places is unique to where we are used ot seeing light,” he said. “You see it through an arch. As the floors collapse, you see it through the holes.”
Into these locales he places lone figures, faces hidden or indistinct, doing indefinable things. Again, the viewer can fill in the narrative. One holds a can of gasoline. Is she an arsonist, or is the can empty? One looks out a window. Is he sad, happy, or just watching the world go by?
“That’s the way we learn stories, through fragments,” Lewis said. “The narrative happens in our own mind.”
“LIGHT IS THE LION THAT COMES DOWN TO DRINK” will be at the Fernando Luis Alvarez Gallery, 96 Bedford St. in Stamford, until April 18. flalvarezgallery.com.
