Equipoise roughly means the balance between opposing forces. It is curious that Carol Pylant would choose that word to title her recent exhibition at Gallery Victor. On inspection, the paintings in this show are about portals; every painting has a doorway or archway leading to somewhere beyond the immediate depicted space. In fact, this group of paintings is an extension of a series she entitles “Portals Series” on her website. The emphasis on portals made me think of Dan Ramirez’s exhibition at Zolla Lieberman Gallery that I reviewed at the end of last year. He had a series of works that also featured portals. As it happens, Pylant and Ramirez are a married couple. Yet, they have significantly different conceptions of what makes a portal. Ramirez’s portals are gateways to a spiritual state of being evolved out of a highly abstract interpretation of Catholicism (see New Art Examiner, Vol. 38, No. 2, January 2024, pgs. 9–13), while Pylant’s are more surrealistic and concerned with an earthly psychological state.

        The exhibition’s title echoes that of one of its pieces, Equipoise (A State of Equilibrium). This work depicts a doorway and a similarly scaled archway separated by a fountain that is topped with two intertwined fish-like serpents. The closed door on the left leads to a dark interior, hinted at through the door’s transom. The archway on the right leads through a corridor to a shallow lake or pond with two bare trees on the other side of the water, all rendered in a hazy, bluish palette. A tuft of swamp grass is sharply rendered to draw your eye to that part of the painting. So, where is the equilibrium noted in the title? The composition is not quite symmetrical, but it is balanced. The architecture is sharply defined, but so is its soiled and partially neglected state. Its walls are stained, especially below the fountain, and the door’s paint is peeling. The painting, with soft blues, grays, and tans, is beautiful and ugly at the same time—the equipoise being expressed is the yin-yang between order and decay.

        But there is an additional dynamic happening in Pylant’s paintings—the portals. There is an oil called Altered that really speaks to this phenomenon. In this symbolism-filled four portal painting, there are two doors, a window, and two archways. First, the main portal is the one the viewer is looking from with its arch spanning the top of the painting. Through this archway, we see a courtyard that has an arched door and corridor next to each other. There is also a small window to the left of the door and a barely perceptible door in the corridor. The doorway is flanked by coiled stoneworks that emanate from two gargoyle-like heads on the ground and merge at a third more benign head functioning as a keystone. This gives the scene a subtle sense of foreboding—and provokes a reluctance to enter that doorway, reinforced by the totally opaque window to its left. The corridor on the right, on the other hand, leads to a lush green garden with poplar-like trees in the distance. In this work, equipoise is achieved through the psychological manipulation of content—in this case, possible confinement versus freedom.

        Symbolism continues in the large painting Encore. In it, Pylant depicts three archways separated by two columns. Steps lead up to the three passageways that, in turn, lead to a lake and pastoral scenery beyond. However, the center passageway is blocked by a large white curtain while the left corridor is completely open, and the right one only embellished with drapery in its arch. At first glance, the scene is quite beautiful with its elegant architectural symmetry and graceful drapery. Then one notices that things are not so idyllic. The relief statuary between the columns and the arches are splattered with bird droppings. Also, the keystone of each outside arch depicts the unhappy head of a lion, its nose also covered with droppings. The center keystone head is of a human with a helmet that protects him from the onslaught. Each arch also has a suspended convex mirror that reflects the scene from which the viewer is coming. These mirrors are bizarrely out of context and give the whole painting a sci-fi undertone, like a scene from Myst, an early computer game. Then, there is the mysterious pole in the background of the left archway disturbing the landscape. What is it? Ultimately, the equipoise appears to be between inaccessible beauty and the rude reality of the world.

        One painting that stood out to me was Aquardar (Waiting Expectantly). Again, one is confronted with a main portal, a doorway to a street. There are fragments of other closed portals in the painting: a balconied window, a street-level window recessed into the wall, and the fragment of another door. But the main entryway is a double door with a smaller door built into one of its panels. There is no secret behind this doorway arrangement. It leads to a courtyard of a country village farmer. The double doors are used to allow passage for large carts and the smaller built-in door is uses for everyday passage by people. My grandfather’s house in France, where I lived in the 1940s, had such a door, as did every other village farmer in the town. That deep set window is probably a window to a shallow cellar used to keep root vegetables and wine cool. Note that in this painting, a stone paved street contains a sewer drain and, on the right, a drainpipe from a higher story is clamped to the wall. These temporal incongruities speak to the recentness of Pylant’s visit to Spain, from where her images are sourced. My grandfather’s village had neither paved roads nor drains—the difference that 80 years makes in the look of Europe.

        Pylant’s fondness for the subtly surreal stands out in La Scomparsa (The Disappearance). This painting is unusually asymmetrical. There are four archways, the larger one being a doorway while the other ones are spaces between columns like those seen in a monastery cloister. The foreground surface is a terra cotta and white fish scale tile while the doorway leads to a swamp with an egret and dead trees. This is not a Spanish landscape; it comes from the American Southeast. In the lower right is a mysterious dark spot on the tiles—possibly a spilled liquid, but there is no source for it in the painting. Is that doorway a portal to another time and place? The juxtaposition of the Romanesque European architecture with a contemporary American swamp is jarring, even as the painting is superficially lovely. It made me think of a recent show of the works of the surrealist Remedios Varo at the Art Institute of Chicago. (See Vol. 38, No.3, March 2024, pgs. 25–31.)

        The other unsettling painting is Ballerina of Time. Here an open archway leads from an almost empty courtyard to a landscape engulfed in flames. The shadow of a building slashes the image from upper left to lower right, ending next to a white dog that faces a wall and turns its head to look over his shoulder. The ochre, brown, and red palette of the piece reinforces the apocalyptic undertone. In Pylant’s paintings, portals don’t always lead to somewhere you would want to go.

        There are three other factors that contribute to the exceptional nature of Pylant’s work. First, she has had a long-standing admiration of Romanesque architecture, noticeable in the environments she creates. There are no pointed arches, and the masonry is mostly quite thick and heavy. This architectural style is quite compatible with her inspiration for this series—older structures in rural Spain. It is a style found in much of Southern Europe. That region’s deep and turbulent history brings out the possibility of multiple outcomes when one contemplates the portals prevalent in this selection of Pylant’s work. Second, Pylant is a superb colorist and an accurate limner. All her paintings are rendered in serenely balanced color schemes and crisp compositions that give them their surface beauty—and temporarily hide the more unsettling dichotomies the paintings hold.

        Third, Pylant has a deep respect for European realistic painting style as practiced during and after the Renaissance. She copied paintings by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Raphael, Bronzino, Velasquez, and Da Vinci in her effort to master the techniques of traditional realist painting. (It is interesting that her affinity for architecture is pre-Mediaeval, but her preferred painting style is more inspired by the Renaissance.)

        Realism is experiencing something of a revival, not quite in the rigorous way that Pylant employs, but away from the gestural for its own sake of recent years. That makes her one of the leaders of the current realism revival—not a bad place to be for a septuagenarian.

Michel Ségard is the Editor in Chief of the New Art Examiner and a former adjunct assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has been a published art critic for more than 45 years and is also the author of numerous exhibition catalog essays.