Visual Art Review: Peter Richards and Karen Boutelle

Peter Richards and Karen Boutelle

at Bershad

at Bershad

As if in tacit defiance, one of Peter Richards's sculptures mischievously calls out a challenge to M.C. Escher's ants. The sculpture, a hyper-rotated Mbius strip made of discarded metal vent-covers and fibrous tissue paper, partially lacquered with beeswax, is titled "Sleep with Me." Richards claims with all honesty that this is not meant to be an overt sexual solicitation. "It's more of an invitation," he says, to experience what he calls "osmosis," an existence as form rather than idea. But it's difficult to look at "Bride" and not see in it a female praying mantis made up of weightless rings of paper and metal, like delicate oriental seeds.

Richards, a noted poet and lecturer at Tufts University, is having his first exhibit at the Gallery Bershad. Richards's companion for the show is artist Karen Boutelle, whose mixed-media wall-hangings are more visceral than Richards's pale metal sculptures. Boutelle's "Ambivalent Passages" looks like an open gash with blood pouring forward in hues of petrified amber. But her most spectacular piece, "Ambivalent Passages III," seems to defy this straight sanguine categorization. The layers of cheesecloth, beeswax, shellac, oil bar, paint and rice paper that Boutelle uses in her art are here transformed into a composition reminiscent of Gustav Klimt's "Water Serpents," mermaids entangled in algae and veins, now in vivid carmine hues.

Aside from the art, Gallery Bershad is also a noteworthy concept in itself. Formed by the Bershad architecture firm last year under the direction and vision of Blaine Bershad, the gallery is unique in locale, right around the corner from the Somerville Theater. Who knew that good art was so close to home?

New work by Karen Boutelle and Peter Richards is on display through March 13 at the Gallery Bershad at 99 Dover St. in Somerville, near to the Davis Square station. Hours are Wed. through Sun., 12 to 6 p.m., Friday and Saturday, 12 to 8 p.m.

Above: Peter Richards, "Sleep With Me," 1999, paper, steel, beeswax.