Adam Belt at Quint Gallery
for Riviera Magazine; July issue, 2007
Younger artists dream of a moment like this; a first solo show at a major contemporary art gallery. It’s a shot at the big time.
For Adam Belt, this dream comes true on Saturday evening, July 13 when an exhibition of his latest work opens at the Quint Gallery, in La Jolla. A miscellany of people; some from San Diego’s art crowd and some from beyond, will gather to talk shop, chitchat and, for the first time, take a look at what this 32 year old has to offer.
The Carlsbad-based artist knows what the situation means. “For someone like me who hasn’t built much of a name ” he says, “it’s obviously exciting to have a show like this. The Quint Gallery represents a lot of top level artists and deals with serious collectors and museums. I’ve had several college gallery exhibitions and I’m thankful for it, but this is a whole different ballgame. There’s a much higher level of scrutiny and critical attention directed toward my work. There will be a lot of sharp eyes, so it’s a big challenge. And, yes, I’m a bit nervous.”
What gallery visitors will see in Belt’s work, at least at first glance, are large nearly all-white paintings with a small black area off towards a corner of the format. The look is cool and minimalist, evoking a kind of calmness and serenity that’s become quite unfamiliar in the work of most younger artists today whose hotly colored, high emotional, image-packed paintings seem to come screaming out at you. With Belt’s work, the paintings quietly wait for you to take a look.
Even the slightest such look reveals that the paintings which looked abstract a first aren’t abstract at all.
This transformation from abstraction into representation occurs as the eye takes a closer look at the small, dark hued areas near the middle of his seemingly undifferentiated white surfaces. Here, the artist has used black pencil to create a highly realistic drawing of a hydroelectric dam, with the shadow cast on the dam’s face by its enclosing canyon being by far the densest and darkest area anywhere in the painting. Recognizing this very realistic form, the eye begins to see the contours of the waters collected behind the dam in the curving forms of a white paint that barely separates itself from the surrounding white canvas.
Indeed, this is landscape, vast in scale and highly purified, and presented in a way that pulls the viewer in by leaving room for the imagination to fill in what Belt leaves out.
At the Quint Gallery show, Belt offers this vision in paintings of Glen Canyon Dam, Hoover Dam, Parker Dam, and similar locations in various parts of the world. In all, eight such paintings comprise the exhibition; all of them created within the last year in the studio/garage of his home south Carlsbad.
Belt arrived at this work through a life-long fascination with landscape and the forces that shape it. He grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the various forms and textures of the landscape are readily apparent in the barren terrain.
An even more powerful impression of landscape and its formation came to Belt during his adolescent years when he would spend summers around Lake Powell and Glen Canyon Dam. “It’s an amazing place. You can barely grasp the scale of things,” he says, recalling those experiences. “You’d drive over the dam and there’s a long steep drop to the bottom of the canyon on one side, and
a huge lake on the other, nearly at eye level. Then, looking up at the dam from the canyon bottom, you can feel the strength, the muscle in its massive structure and imagine, with all that water behind it, what would happen if it suddenly failed. It was equally eerie to be on the lake in a boat and to see that some distance away the lake suddenly stopped, as if in the middle of the air.”
These kinds of experiences, of physical forms and emotional impressions, have inspired Belt’s artmaking from its beginnings. His earliest expressions took the form of landscape painting. He describes these as being “quite conventional,” largely because that was just about the only kind of artistic treatment of landscape that he’d seen in the galleries around Albuquerque and the kind of teaching he encountered in his early experiences as an art student.
His studies at Claremont Graduate School changed all this. There, he encountered a different kind of teaching that emphasized experimentation and the exploration of ideas through artmaking. There was also a greater appreciation of the possibilities of sculpture, which was expansively defined as any work involving three dimensional form.
With this new freedom, he began a series of works that recreate, in a gallery context, the forces and processes that shape the Earth’s surface.
In some of these works, he would pour concrete of varying densities into cube shaped forms, then remove the forms sides. The still unhardened concrete would then slump and ooze from its original confines, leaving eroded shapes within the cube and alluvial-type flows of concrete spreading outward across the floor. He enacted similar processes, and achieved similar results, using large rectangular blocks of compressed granular salt and water; again transforming regularized rational shapes into the myriad irregular forms that occur in the natural world.
Work of this type – which links him to the Earth Art pioneered by the likes of Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, and Walter de Maria a trio of decades ago – continues to come from Belt’s imagination in parallel with his painting and will be presented at La Jolla’s Athenaeum in the spring of 2008.
Already, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego has acquired some of his work, as have some important collectors. The collecting world in general watches this kind of thing, looking for art that’s not only good art but also a promising investment.
You can see what they’ll be seeing starting with the opening reception on Friday, July 13, from 6 to 8pm. The exhibition then continues through September 1.
The Quint Gallery is located at 7739 Fay Avenue, in downtown La Jolla. Entry to the gallery is from the alley between Kline and Silverado. For additional information, contact the gallery at 858-454-3409 or on the Internet at www.quintgallery.com.