Frederic Snitzer has relocated his gallery to Wynwood, and he billed his May 29 reception Lock, Stock, and Barrel as a grand opening celebration of the new space. It's a doozy of a chunk of real estate: capacious and air-conditioned to perfection. The show features a selection of Snitzer's Miami artists doing their usual thing, which often is a version of some more famous artist's usual thing, but there's some real talent in the stable.
Hernan Bas finally seems to be developing authority commensurate with his reputation (he was included in this year's Whitney Biennial) -- an untitled oil on paper of a fey blond boy being pecked bloody by ibises is especially haunting. Jacin Giordano has turned in a Mondrian-ish arrangement of diced acrylic paint that hangs together snappily. And Gean Moreno has channeled his graphomania into an abstract composition of colorfully-patterned paisleys, amoebas, and swirls.
The real charmer in this show, though, is a sculpture by Weston Charles entitled Bamboo Cube. From across the room, it looks like a lime-sherbet green cube covered with ring-shaped coffee stains, some of which have spilled over the edges. In fact, they are stalks of bamboo that are cross-cut on top and rip-cut down the sides and polished, creating a Japanese-style meditation on natural materials and empty space.
Much of the rest is unconvincing, particularly Norberto Rodriguez's self-mocking video self-portrait and Naomi Fisher's nasty drawings of disheveled women. But it is otherwise clear that with Snitzer's arrival, the center of gravity of the Miami art world has shifted to Wynwood.
