Celebrating the unexpected in art

While the current exhibitions at Delaney-Cooke Gallery, Gallery B, and Karyn Mannix Contemporary share little in terms of stylistic continuity or thematic content, all three shows illustrate the importance and primacy of spontaneity and improvisation in the formulation of painterly, photographic, and even literary imagery.

At the same time, in the three exhibitions, the viewer is also aware of the presence of the artists’ intent and the subtle imposition of their own aesthetic priorities as a balance to improvisational impulses. As the British anarchist poet and art critic Herbert Reade observed: “spontaneity is not enough—or, to be more exact, spontaneity is not possible until there is an unconscious coordination of form, space and vision.”

This kind of coordination is particularly apparent in the group show at Karyn Mannix Contemporary in Southampton, “45 Feet” (a label I haven’t quite figured out), which features small 12-inch-square canvases by 15 artists from that gallery’s collective membership.

Arranged in the front gallery so that each artist seems to be transmitting short bursts of information that then create interesting dialogues with other works, this show has an unmistakable sense of vibrancy, especially in the way in the way disparate styles and priorities are tied together.

The exhibit gets really interesting, though, in the rear gallery, where artists were paired with assigned poems by local poets and told to create their own response to the poetry (quite coincidently, the exact opposite of the approach in the recent collaboration of the poet Marc Cohen with the painter Paton Miller at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor).

Requiring artists to search inside themselves to respond to someone else’s rather personal imagery, the concept ties into emotional and psychological connections between the two disciplines that have existed for centuries. As Wallace Stevens wrote in his book on poetics, “The Necessary Angel”: “No poet can have failed to recognize how often a detail ... or remark, in respect to painting, applies also to poetry. The truth is that there seems to exist a corpus of remarks in respect to painting, most often the remarks of painters themselves, which are as significant to poets as to painters.”

Perhaps most significantly, as the Greek poet Simonides wrote, “Painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks.” In this case, they must speak also to each other.

In some cases, such as the collaboration between Athos Zacharias and Mary Bromley, this conversation is expressed in highly abstract and expressionistic terms, with the measure of emotional tension in the poem reflected in the artist’s use of simplified forms and pronounced emphasis on negative space in the compositional arrangement of images.

This emotive framework is also present in Krysten Ubertini’s interpretation of Douglas Swezey’s poem “#830,” although the artist also uses lettering collaged into the painting surface, which subtly echoes physical elements of the poem itself.

The exhibition “45 Feet” continues at Karyn Mannix Contemporary in Southampton through September 12.

While the degree of spontaneity at Karyn Mannix is derived from a form of an artistic response to art, at Gallery B it emanates from a response to actual reality in the photographs of Michael Reinhardt.

This is noteworthy for the fact that, as a well-known fashion photographer whose work was featured in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, and Sports Illustrated, among many others, Mr. Reinhardt usually focused on a contrived authenticity, in which grace and beauty took primacy over the grittier world that exists in actuality.

In these works, though, Mr. Reinhardt turns his attention to a distinctly less glamorous world, and instead offers completely spontaneous images of roadside billboards, empty fields awaiting development, and offhand though ironic images of various urban scenes. Using a small Leica camera that he carried between shoots, he has captured images that are emotional and evocative without ever becoming preachy or judgmental, seeking to reflect random moments with a sense of sardonic distance that never teeters over the line into satire or sociological condemnation.

The exhibition of photographs by Michael Reinhardt, “American Graffiti,” continues at Gallery B in Sag Harbor through September 13.

If the focus in Mr. Reinhardt’s work leans toward images of a vanishing America, Rocco Liccardi’s paintings and collages at Delaney-Cooke Gallery in Sag Harbor take on a more Asian orientation, reflecting the artist’s extensive travels over the years to India, Japan, the Philippines, and Thailand. This is rather overt in works such as “Bangkok Temple Series #1” or an untitled piece with collaged strips of a Chinese newspaper included.

In others, the influences are subtler in their evocation of painterly calligraphic images that owe as much to Franz Kline as Toko Shimada or other Japanese calligraphers.

Made from gold and silver leaf, shells, and corrugated cardboard, the works evoke a powerful sense of space, while the artist’s effective use of geometry to orchestrate the picture plane is both rhythmically gentle and surprisingly assertive.

The exhibition of paintings and mixed media works by Rocco Liccardi at Delaney-Cooke Gallery continues through September 8, after which the gallery will be closing its doors, although Ms. Delaney-Cooke will continue as a private dealer.