The natural landscape may be the primary subject for Paul Vincent Bernard and Sherman Bloom’s exhibitions at the Gallery at Library Square, but their abstracted works transcend traditional representations of the genre to investigate essential meanings and structures. Bernard’s series of painted iconic forms, abstracted from geologic elements, defy all specificity to particular being and time and invite the viewer to explore eternal, universal meanings while Bloom’s photographs of flowers and earth refrain from the traditional depictions of nature to explore possibilities of significance and imagination. Appreciating the work of both artists challenges standard means of perception, while discovering meaning in their work results in a show that is visually stimulating and conceptually rewarding.

In Rocks and Flowers: Composition, Texture, Metaphor Sherman Bloom exploits photography’s traditional means for new ends. He uses the medium’s natural penchant for cropping to investigate formal components within landscape and nature: color, shape, contour, texture, depth and features these elements for their own sake and not as parts to a whole. The viewer is invited to look inward upon Bloom’s subjects with a limitless play of perception and recognition that can render new and imaginative compositions that emerge from these abstracted images.

The first half of this collection features seventeen photographs in dramatic black and white of natural phenomena including canyons, rock formation, and deserts – landscapes familiar to Utahns. Yet Bloom apparently wishes to avoid familiarity, opting for the foreign that comes with displacement. He achieves this sense by the primary technique of eliminating the horizon line in all but one print, as well as intensive contrasts of light and dark, thus distancing these forms from the familiar iconography of a landscape. “Tufa Enclosure of Cappadocia” is assuredly a sandstone outcrop, but it has an immediate effect of feminine sensuality, or numerous other associations that are engendered by this displacement. This technique allows the beauty and character of the land to resonate with the viewer’s imagination and is not limited to a subordinate element of the traditional landscape photograph.

Bloom’s series of eight floral photographs are in graphic color and their compositional focus on the stamen of each flower pushes all negative space outside the frame. Like the landscape photographs, these works achieve a sort of displacement by giving the viewer a visually intense arrangement of pure shape, pattern and color that rouses the imagination. “Phalanopsis in Red and Yellow” seems alive and even intimidating. There is a sense of veritable presence in each of the subjects be it inviting or be it threatening. Both of Bloom’s series allow the viewer to focus on particular structural elements of rocks, of flowers, not sublimated into a formal landscape or still-life, but as its own entity to be discovered for its own beauty. The act of seeing is liberated in a lively response to the compositional use of natural structural elements within these subjects, objects of beauty discovered in a new context, granting a wealth of meaning.

While Bloom’s photographs challenge the traditional landscape as commonly perceived, Paul Vincent Bernard’s works in Guardians: Consideration of Forms in Space and Place are expressive abstract entities that each transcend the static physicality of the land and consider ideas such as being and time. Bernard’s collection is composed of several groupings or phases. Each individual piece in a grouping maintains an expressive narrative quality that signifies its ephemeral and existential state. They each have the potential to incite an aesthetic conversation with the perceptive and curious viewer. Each of the pieces speaks of the past, present and future, of which they are “guardians.” In Bernard’s words these structures are about “geology and the passage of time.”

The most prominent phase within the several groupings in the show consists of the “Guardians” themselves. They may initially bear a resemblance to bold and cold abstract expressionism, but further exposure reveals that they indicate an expressive significance that is palpable.They are above all temporal in their being; they have a history, they exist in the present and the immediate and indicate a future. As Bernard suggests, these formidable entities, “don’t leave a lot of room for the viewer and we become smaller and less significant.” “Guardian of the Plain No. 2” has all of the permanence and monumentality with the sense of mystery and awe of Stonehenge, which, admits Bernard, was part of its inspiration and conception. It looms large and governing like an ancient Babylonian ziggurat and witnesses the passing of time, the ebb and the flow, like the Spiral Jetty. Eight more “Guardians” comprise the series, each with its own space and place; they are “watchers, and we,” says Bernard, “attach our own meaning to them.”

“Wasatch Fault Scarp” and “Kayenta Formation” are two simple canvases that can be read to be as eternal as the land allows. Each contains myriad geological strata with each of these representing its own epoch and these being innumerable in each work. These expressive canvases encourage the viewer to penetrate literal and figurative depths and we find a narrative that defines space and place as much as it defies it in its transcendental mystery. In these empirical mappings of natural phenomenon are embedded laws of nature beyond any relative history of being and time.

Bernard does not break with the primary subject of temporality in the six visually distinct white, minimally rendered canvases that are composed of a series of repeated marks or the sequential use of the numbers 1 through 12,490. “A Bit More Time or Less” began this phase of the collection with the illness of Bernard’s mother and culminated eventually with her passing in December. This seemingly exhaustive series is a measure of time, a personally significant work for Bernard that seems to say that “whatever our place, it is small, insignificant, we may not even count.”

In these multi-faceted and inventive works both artists present subjects in form and content that are inspired by the natural world yet evoke themes that transcend the limits of nature to challenge the viewer’s perception and consequently inspire universal meaning. Bloom investigates the sublime beauty that can be observed within the structures of rocks and flowers while Bernard’s geological history of expressive monumental abstractions indicate existential and temporal states of balance. As both artists avoid absolutes and encourage universality the viewer is free to contemplate these images and indulge in a lively and playful response evoked by art that invites a freedom of perception and a universality of meaning unleashing the power of this art seen in its profundity.

Rocks and Flowers: Composition, Texture, Metaphor by Sherman Bloom and Guardians: Considerations of Form in Space and Place by Paul Vincent Bernard is at the Gallery at Library Square through March 4.

Ehren Clark

Ehren Clark studied art history at both the University of Utah and the University of Reading in the UK. For a decade he lived in Salt Lake City and worked as a professional writer until his untimely death in 2017.