Patrick-Earl Barnes’s “Shotgun House” continues at the Heath Gallery in Harlem through October 19 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The Heath Gallery
24 West 120th St.
Thursday – Saturday through October 19
646-872-0419
www.patrick-earl.com
www.heathgallery.squarespace.com
A few years ago, we met self-taught deep-folk artist Patrick-Earl Barnes on a SoHo street, selling his compelling artwork. Barnes concentrates on two primary series: “Family Ties,” paintings and fabric collages inspired by his late father, and “Shotgun House,” acrylic paintings on canvas or wood of the historical architectural dwelling. The latter is the subject of his current show at the Heath Gallery in Harlem, which continues through October 19. In the front room, fourteen works of different sizes line the walls, primarily paintings of multiple rows of tiny shotgun houses with names based on their color scheme: “Pink Agboile,” “Powder Blue Agboile,” “Kool Aid Red Agboile,” “Black Denim Agboile.” Two of the works feature a male figure in the foreground. Barnes, who was raised in Shreveport, Louisiana, and is now based in Brooklyn, gives the repeated images a sociocultural power that goes well beyond their apparent simplicity; shotgun houses are small, inexpensive residences that began in West Africa and spread throughout the American South following the Civil War. Among the stories behind their curious name, and the one Barnes favors, is that if you opened the front and back doors, you could fire a shotgun right through the house, the pellets not hitting anything as they entered one end and exited the other. “I’ve used my open air art gallery in SoHo to educate everyday people about a cultural and aesthetic experience that remains misinformed and underrepresented,” Barnes said about an earlier show at Heath, but that statement relates to “Shotgun House” as well. Be sure to check out the back room, which is displaying gallery owner Thomas “Hat Man” Heath’s beautiful, complex paintings of men, women, and children of the African Diaspora.
Juliette Binoche gives a gut-wrenching performance as the traumatized title character in Bruno Dumont’s heartbreaking Camille Claudel 1915. The film takes place over the course of several days in 1915, as the sculptor and former mistress of Auguste Rodin awaits a visit from her younger brother, poet, devout Christian, and diplomat Paul Claudel. Camille has been moved to an asylum in Montdevergues, where she prepares her own meals for fear of being poisoned on orders from Rodin, who she believes is still trying to ruin her life and career twenty years after their personal and professional relationships ended. Run by nuns, the asylum is home primarily to deeply disturbed women incapable of taking care of themselves and barely able to speak coherent sentences. Claudel, a loner who was committed by her family shortly after the death of her father, desperately wants to be released and get her life back, but everything seems to be poised against her. Binoche, her pale face appearing to have been chiseled like one of Claudel’s sculptures, plays Camille with a subtle yet stern beauty, giving several long, impassioned speeches that writer-director Dumont (Twentynine Palms, L’humanité) and cinematographer Guillaume Deffontaines shoot in single takes, the camera remaining still, Camille framed like a painting. Throughout the film, Camille is seen amid mostly blacks, grays, browns, and whites, a monochromatic color scheme that echoes her work. The film has a cinéma vérité feel, as much of the sparse dialogue is improvised, many of the nuns are nurses at the asylum, and several of the patients are actually committed there, lending a neo-Realist quality to the austere setting. The film, which is “freely adapted from” Paul’s writings and letters, Camille’s letters, and medical records, is not a biopic; instead, it’s a fascinating study of a talented artist and the mental anguish that ultimately overwhelmed her.
