CAUTION: MEN FALLING

‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’ Or how Allan Balisi’s paintings are like Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story.

Allan Balisi paints sadness (an observation he does not agree with). His canvases are not histrionic fits that demand an audience, but intimate moments of anguish that occur when no one is looking. His melancholy is the kind that descends on you during the witching hours, when no one else is awake and the world is awash in black and gray. Without revealing many details, he creates poignant stories that slowly drown you in desolation.

According to literary lore, writer Ernest Hemingway boasted that he could write a story in six words. A betting pool was set up and Hemingway supposedly won the pot with the sentence “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” In six words, he told a story that broke hearts because of one simple detail. The rest was up to your imagination.

Balisi is like Hemingway in that sense.

In If You Fall, You Fall Alone, he presents five major monochromatic canvases with subtle hints of blue, green, and brown, and a series of smaller works colored in the same muted palette. His paintings, clean and uncluttered, do not confuse the eye with superfluous embellishments.

There is no narrative arc. Each piece is a plot unto itself, open to solitary introspection aided only by cryptic titles. The show coheres because of the emotional resonance of each work. They all feel joe brooks dating game lyrics the same and the nostalgic effects of Balisi’s paintings linger like the smell of rain on a gray day.

A man sprawls out on a stairway in By The Softest Touch, The Gentlest Sword. The V of his splayed legs, pleated pants ending in shiny leather loafers, is the only thing visible to us. Off to the side, we catch a glimpse of an apathetic bystander who steps around the body lying in his path.

Presented with this image, the mind wanders in several directions. The man is dead. The man is drunk. Whatever the circumstances, the one detail we need to know is this: the subject is stretched out on a stairway and no one cares. He fell, this man, and he fell alone.

The somber mood of If You Fall, You Fall Alone is intensified by the matte quality of Balisi’s tones. For the first time, he mixes oil paint with graphite. And Before the First Kiss represents the denouement of this stylistic experiment.

A knoll draped in shadows slopes gently toward the lower right of the canvas where a steaming locomotive billows black smoke as it travels through empty miles, driven by the promise of love fulfilled. Almost everything in this work is done in graphite and in the background, Balisi’s tell-tale rub-marks live on — a reminder that the signature smoothness of his canvases was born out of frustration.

Unsatisfied by his early work, he attempted to destroy his paintings by attacking them with a cloth rag. In this destructive act, Balisi found beauty.

Still, the sadness remains. partner roman catholic dating service Like the rower in Where No Ghost Can Haunt Me, Balisi takes us on a bleak voyage. We are sitting with him in his boat as he braves the ocean. The water is as calm as his face. His eyes are closed and his body tilts while paddling away from phantoms that only he can recognize.

There are secrets in this show.

Secrets in the ebony cloud belched by a train, secrets in the murky depths of a still and silent ocean, and secrets kept by faceless men in drawers, similar to the subject of They Never Miss, They Always Leave a Scar. We are voyeurs granted access to a clandestine act. And yet, we aren’t really sure of what we are seeing. Is the moment recorded by Balisi the act of keeping a secret or discovering one?

By Balisi’s own account, Tear Garden is the most personal work in If You Fall, You Fall Alone. A lone man walks in a frozen landscape. Dwarfed by the canvas, his back is turned to us as he trudges over snow. He hugs his coat and waits for the coming thaw.

Balisi insists that he isn’t depressed. And yet, he presents us with a diptych of two postcard-sized pieces: a mid-range shot of a mangled car installed above a close-up of an urn. Unlike the other paintings in this show, Together With a Small Handful of Souls gives us a straightforward story read from top to bottom. The thread begins with an automobile accident and ends in death.

There is room to breathe here; we aren’t suffocated by pathos. It helps to know that instead of mining his personal history as he did for past shows, Balisi used stills from the archives of The Twilight Zone as visual references. This time, he is detached from the brooding noir-like atmosphere he paints but that distance in no way spares us, his viewers.

Nine small canvases that make up http://www.neversayneverfoundation.org/a04-best-free-adult-dating/ Between Songs are random vignettes that occupy the microscopic lulls of silence separating one bar of music from the next: wall, back, waterfall, hands, couch, bed, fire, bush, house.

They can each tell a story if you want them to. Two sets of hands meet diagonally and clasp each other in Between Songs 4. The woman’s hands are small and delicate, her arms sheathed in bishop sleeves. Her fingers are held protectively in between a man’s palms. Is she reaching out from a window? Is she leaving? The painting feels like farewell. So do the vacant rooms and houses. Similarly empty are the men with bowed heads contemplating a wall.

Balisi makes us feel much even if he reveals so little because the little that he reveals is like Hemingway’s killing detail. “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” “Never worn” metaphorically echoes throughout Balisi’s canvases like a ghostly refrain. — ll