Rain or shine, Sunday is the Atlantic Antic, one of the biggest street fairs in the country metaphor contemporary art is a gallery on Atlantic Avenue and they have a show, appropriately enough, called Slippery When Wet.

Needless to say, water is the theme of this show at the gallery, which is located on 382 Atlantic Avenue between Hoyt and Bond Streets in downtown Brooklyn.

For humans water has a timeless fascination. Covering 2/3
the surface of our planet, water nourishes, cools, cleans, entertains, and
inspires us. And no wonder, as is commonly known, 96% of our bodies is
comprised of water, we are literally made of the stuff. In our embryonic state
we develop while floating in a sort of inland sea, sporting the gills that
suggest our own distant evolution from the enveloping oceans. As a subject for
artists, water is an endlessly fluid metaphor presenting an ever-changing
surface of reflection, complex color, and translucent mystery.
Its' varied nature can be seen as a mirror to our own mercurial moods. Rain can
be soothing or pelting, a stream can murmur gently or roar with destructive
force. Water is the only element that we know well in all its' different states
frozen, liquid, and gas, but it is the liquid state flowing, turbulent, or
still that most attracts us. In Slippery When Wet, 5 painters and 2
photographers explore this liquid realm bringing the stillness of art and a
variety of sensibilities to bear on the the restless motion of this most common
yet still elusive element.
 

Suzan Batu, from Istanbul, makes paintings that present a sharply; focused and
highly contemporary take on the ancient Turkish art of calligraphy. Her
compositions evoke water or wisping steam with a crisp, sinuous line that reels
and puddles as it moves over and across the canvas. Her use of high keyed pop
colors locate her paintings squarely in the present while the eloquent beauty
of her line exhibits the timeless flow of dance

Susan Homer makes delicious paintings with lush painterly surfaces that
are rich in romanticism. In her new painting for this exhibition, her
protagonist, as in so many of her works, is a small bird, here caught amongst fantastic blossoms in a
downpour of juicy grisaille. Homer references pioneering naturalists like
Audubon, and the stylized flatness of Japanese prints and the decorative arts,
merging such disparate sources into giddily organic paintings that present
intriguing avian fables.

Nancy Manter is a photographer and also an accomplished painter. Here
she uses her camera to document  a
series of water drawings made by pulling her fingers through dew that has
gathered on windowpanes. With a nod to the dominant window configurations of
contemporary architecture, her impromptu marks drip and slide across the pane's
slick surface, playfully echoing the grid of the outside screens while clearing
our view to sunlit exteriors.

Joanne Mattera's paintings employ flowing layers of near transparent encaustic which
build into rich and subtle color experiences that reveal hidden depths. Her
group of square paintings from the Silk Road Series shimmer within their
carefully crafted, softly textured surfaces like so many small ponds. In her
painting Vicolo 52,  she carves
through these layers giving a hint of her process in a painting that is bright
with flickering lights.

 
Andrew Mockler creates precise and complex abstractions that here seem to
capture in one place all of the colors that might be seen over the ocean during
a day at the beach from pale mid-day blues and muddied greens to late afternoon
violets and pinks. Mockler alternates passages of impasto with transparent
glazes calling attention to the paints' physicality while constructing
insistent horizontals that lead our eye deep into the matrix of his carefully
calibrated and refreshing color studies.

 
Don Muchow makes intense and quiet photographs that are filled with a
rich sense of place. Working in black and white or near monochrome he invests
his landscape studies with the carefully edited simplicity of Chinese brush
painting. These are elemental landscapes that reward patient viewing with their
pared down, subtly balanced composition and elegant tonalities. Suggesting
settings for an existentialist film these haunting images draw us into their
contemplative moods and provide stages for daydreams.

Peter Schroth is a painter with a strong affinity to the traditions of
plein-air painting. His group of ocean studies were painted on site near the
Atlantic Ocean and retain the immediacy and accurate color made possible by his
proximity to his subject. The viewpoint in these paintings hovers just above
these turbulent surfaces and seems to have us standing beside the painter in the middle
of the rush near the shore. On close viewing the images dissolve into skeins of
calligraphic marks and the bravura brushwork of pure painting.