Imagine a day and night book7/2/2023 when candlelight rises/ on butterfly wings/ to greet the lonely stars." A concluding gallery of the plates emphasizes the artificiality of the secondhand narration, but Gonsalves's work nevertheless casts a spooky spell. Elie Wiesel was deported to Auschwitz with his family in May 1944. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Each of Thomson's passages begins with the title words, and implies more pleasant dreams than the artist's playful but edgy images suggest: "Imagine a night. Wiesel devoted his life to educating the world about the Holocaust. Thomson (Stars and Stripes,reviewed May 26) has the task of retrofitting prose to the finished images, which are related conceptually but like the pictures in Guy Billout's recent Something's Not Quite Right do not form a story. Children glide over brown and green patchwork quilts, which turn to farmland, or cheerfully aim their wagons and bikes down a scary, roller-coaster steep street. An artist cuts his curtains into the silhouette of a city skyline, so that the distinction between the cloth and the horizon becomes unclear. In two candlelit images, narrow cathedral windows metamorphose into tall men in monks' robes. when moonlight spills/ across the water/ to make a path/ for the lightest feet"). In his Escher-like cover image, a moonlit row of pine trees reflects in a dark lake on close observation, viewers see the mirrored space between the trees transforming into a ghostly procession of women in white gowns, illumined by sepulchral lamplight ("Imagine a night./. Gonsalves specializes in optical illusions. Not quite a narrative and not quite a catalogue, this volume presents a series of hallucinatory paintings, loosely unified by atmospheric lyrics.
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