SUNDAY, APRIL 10 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ EE E5
of hope amidst hardship.” The
sky-hued touches are small but
piquant, punctuating areas of
soft colors and textures.
Before turning to visual art
full time, Fragione was a
professional dancer. A sense of
that vocation endures in her
paintings, which convey motion
with free gestures brushed with
paint or penciled atop the
pigment. In pictures such as
“Our Share of Riches Is the
Fragrance of the Lemons,” these
offhand marks give immediacy
to surfaces that appear
otherwise timeless.Cianne Fragione: Songs From My
Home Through April 23 at Gallery
Neptune & Brown, 1530 14th St. NW.Geoff Desobry
There are two styles of
abstract drawing in Geoff
Desobry’s Waverly Street Gallery
show, which is named for a pair
of things, “Shadows and
Dreams.” But the title refers
directly only to the local artist’s
set of 16 black-and-white
pictures, rendered in pastel and
charcoal. Also on exhibit are five
pastels in which orange shapes
float on blue-black fields. The
two series aren’t that dissimilar
in means, but vary significantly
in impact.
The monochromatic drawings
appear more energetic and
spontaneous, with smeary
blacks and large areas of white
that pull the viewer's eye into
the compositions. In “Shadows
and Dreams 7,” for example,
multiple curved strokes intersect
at the bottom, while the top is
open, as if waiting for the lines
to twist themselves northward.
The sense of possibility
intrigues.
Although much simpler in
form, the color drawings have a
strong sense of depth. The most
striking is “Valor,” in which an
orange rectangle levitates, ever
so slightly off-center. The
oblong’s edges are soft, creating
the illusion that the figure
slightly glows. It’s just an orange
box on a black field, but it blazes
like a beacon.Geoff Desobry: Shadows and
Dreams Through April 17 at Waverly
Street Gallery, 4600 East-West Hwy.,
Bethesda.IN THE GALLERIESBY MARK JENKINSF
ollowers of Frank Hallam
Day’s work might well
assume that the D.C.
photographer doesn’t care much
about trees. Forests have
featured in his pictures, notably
framing ancient temples in
fecund Southeast Asia and
vintage trailer homes in equally
overgrown Florida. Yet Day
seems most drawn to man-made
objects, often in a state of
charismatic disrepair, such as
rusted ship hulls and decrepit
Bangkok phone booths. So the
woody theme of his Addison/
Ripley Fine Art show, “Arbor/
Real,” is unexpected.
About a third of the photos
depict a springtime hometown
phenomenon: the cherry
blossom trees around the Tidal
Basin. This is not the easiest
subject to make fresh, but Day's
approach yields distinctive
imagery. The photographer shot
at night, as he frequently does,
to achieve lighting effects that
appear eerily hyperreal. Long
exposures turn the Washington
Monument into a white slice
through the sky and distant
buildings into strings of light,
while the pink and white of the
blossoms are heightened by
shadows.
Even more visually unnatural
are the close-ups of individual
trees that have been bleached of
color and positioned on single-
hued backdrops that range from
soft gray to bold indigo.
Sometimes arranged into
diptychs, these pictures
highlight gnarled trunks and
knotted branches. They were
made in Mexico, Asia, the D.C.
region and other areas to
demonstrate both the
universality and the
individuality of arboreal forms.
Day has a special affinity for
Bangkok’s multilayered clutter,Abstract
messages
of energy
and calm
molecular level nearly
indestructible. In some form, a
Mylar balloon will outlive
anyone who buys, or simply
looks at, one.Tom Holmes: Go Back to
PartyCity Through April 23 at Von
Ammon Co., 3330 Cady’s Alley NW.Cianne Fragione
Cianne Fragione’s pictures —
mixed-media drawing-paintings
that include collaged paper and
fabric — evoke the layers of
history, both figurative and
literal. They specifically suggest
the weathered facades of
centuries-old buildings in Italy,
the U.S.-born artist’s ancestral
land. In the case of “Songs From
My Home,” however, the visual
inspiration had to be closer at
hand. The pieces in Fragione’s
show at Gallery Neptune &
Brown were made entirely in her
D.C. studio over the past two
travel-averse years.
Fragione’s palette is heavy on
pink, tan, brown and gray —
shades of dry earth and aged
stucco — although not restricted
to them. In this set of artworks,
patches of blue represent what
the gallery’s note calls “glimmersretailer invoked in the show’s
title.
The subjects are often
absurdist, but the style is
predominantly realistic, with
occasional expressionist
flourishes. Several pictures,
notably a nighttime scene of a
beaming jack-o'-lantern and its
reflection in a window, are
tightly focused, dramatically
lighted and composed. Others
are more random. The show
includes a self-portrait in which
the full-bearded artist is
positioned below a depiction of a
cartoonish skull mask. The
disconnection is, as intended,
jarring.
A few of the paintings hang on
the wall, but most lean against
folding chrome chairs (which
reflect the daubed images) or
balance on plastic jugs. The
effect is to make the show seem
more impromptu, closer to how
the paintings look when
propped up in the artist’s studio.
The jugs also underscore that
plastic is a motif in Holmes’s
work, which features several
detailed renderings of large
sheets of shiny colored material.
These are a different sort of
memento mori: Plastic is cheap
and perishable, yet at thewhich is displayed in amusing
photos of urban baobabs that
serve many purposes. Festooned
with wires, cables and signs, and
bedecked with banners and
votive offerings, each tree is
overloaded with purpose and
significance. Where the pictures
of individual trees depict each as
a single entity, these photos
show the baobabs to be fully
integrated cells of the total
organism that is Bangkok.Frank Hallam Day: Arbor/Real
Through April 16 at Addison/Ripley
Fine Art, 1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW.Tom Holmes
Flowers are traditionally
found at funerals and gravesites,
but these days some memorial
sites are marked with stuffed
animals and funny-faced Mylar
balloons. Such pop culture
artifacts are among the
inspirations for Tom Holmes’s
“Go Back to PartyCity,” a show of
paintings at Von Ammon Co.
Updating the classical memento
mori, a reminder of mortality,
the Tennessee artist depicts toys,
ornaments and Halloween
decorations. Many of these items
are available at the party-supplyGALLERY NEPTUNE & BROWNPHOTOS BY CRIS IANCULESCUABOVE: Cianne
Fragione’s “ Banks of
Thicket and Fragrance.”
BELOW: Black-and-
white works from Geoff
Desobry’s show
“Shadows and Dreams.”