T.L. Solien at Rhodes College in Memphis this month

T.L. Solien’s "Cemetery Stack"; 60x72"; oil
on canvas; image courtesy the artist and
Tory Folliard Gallery, Milwaukee.


"T.L. Solien as an artist is almost impossible to pin down. With "Cemetery Stack" Solien continues his investigation of the inner life of self-portraiture. His work combines his interest in history of painting and the great stylistic diversity of the making and practice of contemporary art. He employs Pop imagery as a starting point while borrowing and incorporating influences from all spheres of his life experience and knowledge. His paintings present themselves as dense accumulations that are at once deeply troubling and profoundly witty."

Hamlett Dobbins, Director, Clough-Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College




















T.L. Solien's "Wayfarer"; 32x40"; mixed
media on paper; image courtesy Luise Ross
Gallery, New York.


Art in America magazine January 2005 by Charles Dee Mitchell

Things are a mess in T.L. Solien's new paintings (all works 2003). In The Great Skate, laundry is piled on the chairs, candles drip wax onto stacked books and leftovers are everywhere. Mail looks as though it has just been tossed in the air but is not yet flying in every direction.

In Lifeline II, things get worse. A stack of pancakes with melting butter sits near a slice of watermelon.

There's a dingy tea kettle on a dingy table, and the mail that floats in midair is joined by an array of empty take-out food containers. Elongated tube socks on a clothesline hang over the scene. Washing has done them little good. They remain stained and grungy.

Solien renders all these elements in his 60-by-72-inch paintings with a luscious mix of oil and enamel paint applied in a studied but never stifling manner. The colors are saturated but toned down: the whites are creamy, the blues heavy with gray, the reds tend toward orange. Where the paint takes over, it creates amorphous shapes that remain on the surface of the canvas. Drips and stains smear contours and extend beyond the bottoms of depicted forms. The works are a bravura performance by this Wisconsin-based artist, whose show at Luise Ross was the first he'd had in New York in 20 years.

The abundance of detail in Solien's work begs for allegorical interpretation, but I never found and don't expect there is a key to unlock specific meanings in the flying mail or the pancakes or the little snowman that also puts in frequent appearances. Solien plops us into a world where much has happened and things are out of control, and all we can do is appreciate the chaos.

Solien titled the exhibition "Hollow," which implies a judgment of sorts. But "hollow" can also refer to an isolated rural valley surrounded by woods.

When Solien leaves his oil paintings for his smaller works on paper, this is where he takes us. Such settings seem to offer an opportunity for transformation, as when a person gets lost in the woods in a Shakespeare play or a folk tale. An empty mail carrier's bag--perhaps the source of the flying mail in the other works--hangs in a clearing (The Clearing). Solien draws his Wayfarers as bunny rabbits, like characters from some half-remembered children's book. They are embarking on a river journey, their boat crammed with supplies. These small works are mysterious and slightly absurd, but they help to ameliorate the despairing tone that creeps into Solien's larger paintings.