Art Beat: 'Things are not always what they seem' at new 'Wise Guise' exhibit at Narrows

Men of a certain age. Artists ranging in age from their 40s to their 60s.

Colleagues, classmates and friends. Guys with feelings, opinions and emotions deftly expressed in their art.

Guys, who subtly and adroitly say what they say disguised in or with common objects are featured in the “Wise Guise” exhibit at The Narrows Center for the Arts in Fall River.

SouthCoast artists Joseph Fontinha, Keith Francis, Seth Rainville and Don Wilkinson are grouped in what is perhaps one of the best shows I have visited outside of Boston this year. It runs from July 16 through Sept. 2. Please note, in all frankness, I disclose that Don Wilkinson is my friend and a fellow artist.

He asked me to review this exhibit because he curated it. According to his exhibition statement, the show unites four artists who work “in a wide variety of disciplines and with vastly differing temperaments and approaches to the world [and] who share a common thread: things are not always what they seem.”

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The four “guys” include Joseph Fontinha, whose video installments create technologically assisted trompe l’oeil that playfully disguise more serious concepts. Keith Francis offers us his vision with high-concept, no-holds-barred assemblages, sculptures and installations.

Traditional ceramicist Seth Rainville presents vessels that may be mistaken as artifacts from another time. And Don Wilkinson reveals his fascination with art history, comics and pop cultures as well as something he can never disguise.

A cynic visiting this very solid, very profound and very powerful exhibit might be quick to write off the four artists as sensitive new-age guys; to borrow from Christine Lavin’s song. But “things are not always what they seem.”

So, what, or where is the guise other than a play on words from one of Don’s favorite movies – “Wise Guys” — about two, ordinary guys, working stiffs who aspire to be more than low-level hoodlums? You’ll see, there is nothing ordinary about the players in this Wise Guise version.

Fontinha’s visual play uses video to engage the viewer and trick the eye. His use of well-positioned cellphones in “Brutalist Sculpture Review” replaces and recreates reality and while entertaining, remains subtly thought-provoking.

His video installation (“Blizzard Booth”) featuring himself positioned in a snowstorm in a phone booth inside a building, speaks volumes as soon as the aha! moment strikes the viewer. Fontinha’s poetry pieces from “Poems for Industrial Spaces” include “Summer of ’42” and

“Easter Tide,” two solid works misleading in their crude, yet intellectual presentations that force you to read the poems without disappointment.

Francis’s parking meter installation made me smirk at first and then drew me in for the OMG moment hidden in plain sight after noticing the photo of the Earth taken from outer space - our time has been metered and we are, as the title reveals, in “Violation.”

His pinball machine pieces don’t play around. Of the pieces, “It’s Not a Game,” “Democracy It’s a Game” and “Us and Them,” the first is a poignant reminder of the consequences of the Nuclear Age. It hit home - my uncle died of cancer because he was one of the first soldiers at Nagasaki and I grew up with “duck and cover” drills.

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Rainville, a master ceramicist, creates seemingly beautiful containers that appear to be found artifacts or, some sort of scrimshaw or preserved tattoos at first glance. What they contain is what we all carry in our heads, what we think about and store in our hearts.

“Daddy - Why Did the Bad Man Win?” is a theme that lingers in the news cycle and the residue of the 45th resident of the White House. “Suficiente – An Immigration Story”’ is heartbreaking but only if you know of such stories, have one of your own, or have ever been weighed and measured, as Count Adehmar taunted in “A Knight’s Tale.”

Wilkinson loves intellectual puns and pursuits and takes great pleasure in uniting seemingly diverse and disparate concepts and elements found in art history and pop culture as the exhibit statement puts forth. But there’s more going on in his work than the result of a very sharp mind driven by a fascination of, to name a few topics, the superheroes of the Justice League, movies like the “Wise Guys” and oh, one woman.

Wilkinson’s “Finish Your Job” painting is just one example of his work’s comic book, funny paper, graphic novel vibe. His pieces feature and focus on playful, tongue-in-cheek, sexual themes combined with several of Picasso’s periods or Warhol-esque styles.

And then there’s the photo booth antics as in ”Your Random Arrangement Is Perfectly Planned,” which homophobes will consider the most provocative piece in the show. His intellect aside, there is something so very heartfelt in two of his paintings where he absolutely fails to disguise his heart and his heart of hearts.

He is fully exposed in “Not My Beautiful Wife” and “You,” which it also features, and hangs next to it.

Go see this show and go back more than once at The Narrows Center for the Arts, 16 Anawan St., Fall River, from July 16 through Sept. 2. For more information, visit www.narrowscenter.org.

This week's Art Beat was written by guest columnist Ron Fortier, a Southcoast-based painter who writes for several local and regional publications.

This article originally appeared on The Herald News: 'Things are not always what they seem' at new Fall River art exhibit