Review by Christina Hill

Cass Café, August 24 – November 8, 2008

What is the connection between a pretty pink tulip and the international symbol for radiation? An answer is artist Gary Eleinko, now showing work at Cass Café. Here Eleinko is inspired by geopolitical, scientific and environmental concerns, and natural disasters such as tornados and earthquakes. An avid gardener, he depicts hybrid flowers, seed pods and desert landscapes. Yet despite these straight interests, at bottom there is nothing straight about Eleinko or his art. He cares as passionately as Al Gore about the health of the planet, but the ghost of Ricky Ricardo whispers to him while he works and off he goes: Babalou!

Eleinko produces what he calls 3-dimensional paintings. Endlessly inventive, he is not content with oil on canvas, but works with wood, glass, copper, garden hoses or even red twig dogwood, as in “Red Thicket.” Or adds texture with nails as in “Desert Fault,” an earthquake piece. Or rebar in “Core-U.P.” (Existing in a separate category are the modernist assemblages he’s always made.) Eleinko lived in Detroit during the fabled Cass Corridor period of the 1970’s. He was influenced, but as a public school teacher needing to stay in the closet at work, he couldn’t live the dissolute, self-destructive life associated with that era’s art stars. And unlike them he only rarely raided urban garbage piles. Industrious, well-organized and reliably cheerful, Eleinko visits Home Depot and collectibles shops for material. He’s a neat freak, admitting: “I try to be sloppy but I keep cleaning it up.”

The signature X-shapes, which have long structured and stabilized Eleinko’s compositions, reflect his desire to keep his life and work under control. But since retirement he’s allowed more freedom into his work, although pieces representing merging fault lines or wind turbines are still dominated by crossing diagonals. In others, however, something odd happens when structure and freedom vie and rigidity competes with organic growth. “Hemerocallis X #3” and its partner “#1,” done with oil on wood carved with a jigsaw, refer to a type of lily, but Eleinko wrestles with his opposing impulses and the result is mesmerizing. Parts of flowers morph into abstractions of human genitalia, the wood’s edges are sensous, bulb shapes are suggestive and the texture of the wood recalls human skin. There seems a sensation of throbbing and a spark occurring where diagonals meet in the center. Despite all that nothing is overt. That the pieces remain unresolved is what makes them intriguing. Is it really there or just your own dirty thinking?

“Enigma”   2008    108″ x 108″   wood, cassette tapes, vhs tapes, floppy discs, slides, oil, polyurethante, vinyl lettering.

Perhaps the sex comes from Eleinko’s (or the viewer’s) subconscious, but there is no avoiding sexual undertones in his work if one gets intimate with it. His small wall sculpture, “Field,” might represent a greatly magnified patch of grass, but with its triangular shape it is more salaciously a vagina with attached pubic hair of droopy plastic tubing. “Molten Tulip” might be just that, but its swollen shape and pinkish shades suggest the soft, sensitive head of a penis. “Bloom Buds” reads as testicles – maybe. One questions one’s own perversions: why do the central round openings in pieces such as “Cane-Yin/Yang Cat. 69,” made of painted carpet with jaggedly cut edges and representing a double hurricane, suggest bodily orifices? Well, hello! Eleinko has included that “69” in the title. To paraphrase the response of a studio boss, from Preston Sturges’s great 1941 film “Sullivan’s Travels,” to his star director’s plea to forsake profitable comedies and make a serious film: “Ok, but only if there’s a little sex.”

Eleinko no doubt has serious concerns about the planet. But as with the sex, he cannot repress his desire to entertain. Whatever the subject, he livens things up by adding color, rhythm, sensuality, beauty and humor. A piece such as “Fleur Dangereuse,” warning of death by radiation, is made from wooden shims painted red and yellow to mimic the petals of a huge, round flower. “Tropical Hybrid,” obstensively a leaf, riffs like a saxophone. Flowers look like marimbas and drum sticks. All the tropical botanical pieces installed on a single wall would make a fabulous, kitschy backdrop for a Latin band. Plus there is Eleinko’s sentimental side. Corridor artist Gordy Newton, it seems safe to say, would not have placed the mate to a broken, ceramic bird, stuck forelornly within the colorful riot of stuff in “Aftermath 1,” above it in the café’s rafters to keep watch on his beloved.

“Tropical Hybrid” 2005 80″ x 26″ oil, canvas, wood

Eleinko is also capable of being fully focused and resolutely straightforward. In his ambitiously mammoth piece, “Enigma,” made of cassette tapes, VHS tapes, floppy discs and slides, he includes all outmoded forms of communication. Foregoing whimsy and disregarding his playful inclinations, Eleinko has produced a masterful, tightly-designed abstract work in which he contrasts the “past future” to the “future past.” The shiny metal of the discs provide a repetitive gleam; bold color combinations march in strict geometric order; all is precise and compelling. In “Suichaun 2008,” inspired by the Chinese earthquake, Eleinko is also able to fuse form and subject without distractions. A very complex, colorful work, it allows us to feel the ground cracking, the mountains crumbling, buildings collapsing and fear the fate of fragile children and delicate vegetation. It is beautiful and frightening at the same time.

“Suichaun 2008″ 2008 - 23″ x 30″ inkjet transfer, spray paint, watercolor, gouache, pencil

Eleinko’s strengths are his boundless creativity, his willingness to work hard, his ceaseless curiosity about the world, his genuine interest in human interaction, and his childlike enthusiasm for filling his work with his love of life. Strong color, surprising forms and materials and humorous interpretations of subject matter flow naturally into his art. Art which is refreshing because it is never cynical but genuinely optimistic. And the fact that he has trouble walking a straight line, because he can’t always quiet the competing impulses in his head that point him in different directions, is fortuitous for the viewer. We get the fun of puzzling over the results.