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Bernal Gallery, Chicago

This gallery specializes in promoting aspiring, young, unknown Chicago artists with a few out-of-state additions. Lucrecia A. Bernal, director of the gallery, likes to give complete freedom to her young artists, for the sake of the imagery and statements they strive to portray: in fact, most of her artists help to organize and set up their own shows.
Bernal Gallery specializes in modern art that is highly conceptual. Such works include paintings, prints, photography, sculpture, and ceramics. The gallery has been in Chicago for more than five years.
Some of the featured artists at the gallery include Philip Chen, visionary, architectural lithographs influenced by family remembrances; Candy Hrones, watercolors that represent sweetly colored, pastel images of fantasy dogs and cats; Eric Jensen, ceramic and mixed-media sculpture of abstracted, windowed buildings and openwork screens that are derived from grids. Also featured is Lucrecia's father, Jose Bernal, whose fetish paintings and porcelain sculptures of females lead the viewer into becoming a voyeur. Other interesting gallery artists include Jay Zerbe, whose figurative and scenic paintings and pen-and-ink drawings are highly representational and symbolic.
Of particular interest here are the black-and-white photographs of Puerto Rico by John Kimmich; the binocular-shaped gestural paintings of Joel Sheesley; the highly rendered prisma-color, graphite, and acrylic drawings of Ann Slavik; and the flat, abstract oil paintings of David Rich. Other artists whose work has been shown in the past include Cuban-born Patricio Texidor's photo-realist drawings and paintings of ethnic people; the fabricated sculpture of Roland Wolf; the black-and-white photographs of Neil MacDonald; the color photographs of Janice Bell and Liz Lamont; and the infrared photographs of Margaret Peterson. Shown recently are the whimsical, small, intimate drawings of Les Allen, with pen-and-ink overlays that provide a geometric quality; and the motion drawings of Lin Rabin, done in fine pencil detail with a very out-of-focus movement quality. Lucrecia Bernal herself does abstract, landscape watercolor paintings inspired from Chicago street scenes, rooftops, and water towers.

Les Krantz

Within the present group of small watercolors by Candy Hrones there is a range from small, sweetly colored pastel images of fantasy dogs and cats to larger, more dramatic black-and-white animal patterns on black paper. The smaller works resemble, from afar, the print on flannel children's pajamas, except for the savagery with which the pastel creatures prey on each other, biting and tearing flesh. In the more recent black-and-white works the focus on the fantastic, prancing animals is closer and more dramatic; the value contrast heightened.
Jay Zerbe presents his personal recipe of Chicago "Hairy Who" stock, spiced with a strong Middle Eastern flavoring, garnered from the time he spent in Lebanon. The drawings narrate tales of prodigality, loneliness, and violence, acted out by little characters stuck in the spindly web of the pen strokes.
Eric Jensen's delicate free-standing porcelain, wood, and paper constructions are architectural. Coloristically they are akin to the pastels of Hrones' watercolors. The "corners" or "facades" extend into space as the thin porcelain merges with the balsa wood grid with rice paper windows. The pieces have little more weight than the light which casts the shadows of the waffle-like forms.

Judith Kanin