If we’re honest, we have to admit that, as wonderful as our hood is, no one could accuse it anymore of being a refuge for struggling artists. Those days are long gone. I remember the last of them in the 70s: cheap apartments, tons of gin mills, quirky little shops stowed away on the backstreets and remnants of the working class community it had lately been when bohemians made their pilgrimage here.
So how lucky we are that a few young bohemians have come among us fat cats to mount an art show at Grounded, the café on Jane Street just east of the Corner Bistro. The featured artist and curator, David Litman, is the son of one of my oldest friends, Pat Feinman, the brilliant sculptor whom I met here in the West Village in 1977.
David is the former manager of Grounded and currently working as a graphic designer at Village Digital on West 13th Street (down the stairs, just west of 8th Avenue). He invited fellow artists Djamel Haoues and Jim Secula to exhibit their work alongside his. For the entire spring season, Grounded’s walls will be brimming with colorful drawings. Undeniably, these works point to a new era. What the three artists have in common is that they are all brazenly figurative—in fact, they defy every old abstract school in the same way the boy cried out that the emperor was naked.
Over the past few years, I have seen other examples of David Litman’s work at Grounded. His drawings have always been fierce and technically stunning. I thought to myself how immense his talent was and how unsurprising that was, considering who his mother is. Even so, I wasn’t prepared for this series. David Litman is now in full control. His work has taken a giant leap into the sphere of an assured artist no longer focused on technique, which he has mastered, but able to directly convey imagination to the page, or, in one case, to vinyl.
These artists have something to say—they are doing so through their nontraditional choice of media and unapologetically elegant representation. Their work is subversive because it is elegiac, sad and rueful with a kind of sweet regret for a dying world. David’s choice of medium, Giclée, or fine-art digital print, decries exclusivity. Djamel Haoues’s drawings are delicate and sophisticated without being cynical. Only Jim Secula’s work is overtly righteous—both David and Djamel, on the other hand, seem to be on the far side of that—not defeated or resigned exactly, but plaintively wistful—in that place we go beyond anger and just before despair.
David’s wry prints are grounded squarely in the surrealist tradition. Young starlets on TV are always talking about how ‘surreal’ it is to be sashaying down the red carpet. Apparently, David has spent some time contemplating ‘surreal.’ His odd, centaur-like creatures are moored inside a T.S. Eliot wasteland of functionality. Djamel’s drawings avoid confrontation altogether, taking us instead to a land of dreams. They are almost dainty, sometimes barely there and sometimes bursting off the page as if they were about to fade before our eyes.
Don’t think because Grounded isn’t a bonafide gallery that what is hanging there this spring is anything less than true art. Like I said, we’re lucky we don’t have to travel to the outskirts of another borough to catch a glimpse of the future. Treat yourself to more than a chai latte—go to Grounded!
