Joseph Noderer at Linda Warren Gallery

Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 264 : Mar 18–24, 2010 

Joseph Noderer’s recent landscapes don’t just map his transition from Chicago to Austin, Texas. The paintings also reflect a clear shift in mood for the artist, who received his M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. The work created in his old Chicago neighborhood is darker, highlighting dead trees and the backs of ramshackle houses that tilt at odd, almost sinister angles.

Once he reaches Austin’s back roads, Noderer keeps his emotions on the surface, adopting a palette of soft grays and greens that enables him to present abandoned structures and nature’s hidden places in a more comforting, familiar light. In our favorite piece in the show, Drifter (2009), the artist pins a lone cactus against a brilliant backdrop of gold-tinted mountains and hazy sky. The peace and sense of belonging emanating from Drifter and his other Texas landscapes make the otherwise unassuming works worthy of a second look, particularly Late Ramble (2009), in which a bucolic road assumes the contemplative air Henry David Thoreau bestowed on Walden Pond.

Though they’re confined to the gallery’s small Project Space, Cincinnati artist Michael Stillion’s paintings threaten to overpower Noderer’s more muted canvases, due to their loud colors, frenetic brushwork, and balance of humor and horror. Several pieces follow “the Wonderer,” a scrappy little character who naps on the backs of cows and camps under the stars, as he treks across the desert. While Noderer’s and Stillion’s artistic approaches diverge, both create work notable for its dreamlike qualities.

- CW