By Peter Koloff
Ninety-one galleries filled Starrett-Lehigh for the opening of Affordable Art Fair New York, and by early evening the place was packed.
With that much work in one room, I stopped trying to take everything in. I just paid attention to what made me stop walking and what I could actually imagine living with.
People weren’t only there to look. I saw a substantial line during the evening and several visitors leaving with wrapped works under an arm.
Hunt Slonem was an easy stop for me. New River Fine Art had a full wall of his rabbits, each one framed almost like a small portrait. I already love Slonem’s work, so there was nothing to discover here. Seeing the rabbits repeated across different colors only made me want one more.
Photography by Peter Koloff
Philippe Charles Jacquet, presented by M Fine Arts Galerie, pulled me in differently.
His coastal scenes have an unusual stillness. A small boat hangs against a stone wall. A lone figure stands near the water. In another painting, a house seems almost stranded at the edge of the sea. There is so much empty space around everything that the scenes start to feel cinematic.
I kept going back to them.
Then there was Abigail Bowen’s Talia at Circus Gallery.
This is the kind of painting I could picture immediately in a home. The center seems to glow out of the canvas, surrounded by deep blue and amber forms that almost disappear into each other.
Photography by Peter Koloff
Enrique González, presented by Al Contar del Arte, was one of the real discoveries of the evening.
The gold surface caught me first. Then the figure.
A woman in a blue dress stands against a field of gold, with a red flag breaking the background. The image reads like a devotional painting that wandered into the wrong century.
Photography by Peter Koloff
I was also drawn to Yelena Lezhen’s textile work.
Faces appear everywhere in the fabric, some obvious, some half-buried in the color and texture. From a distance, the compositions read as one large image. Up close, individual figures start separating themselves from the surface.
The more I looked, the more people seemed to appear.
Photography by Peter Koloff
By the end of the evening, I was watching the crowd almost as closely as the art. I noticed what made someone stop and which booths pulled people back for a second look.
That is part of what I liked about Affordable Art Fair. It was as good for people watching as it was for discovering artists.
Photography by Peter Koloff
If you enjoy contemporary art and you are in New York, I would recommend going without doing too much homework first. There is something better about seeing a work, reacting to it, and only then finding out who made it.
This was also my last major New York art stop before heading to Paris, where I’ll be covering Montmartre Festival, September 25 to 27.
The setting will be completely different, but the reason for going is much the same.
I don’t know yet what I’m going to find.
That’s exactly why I’m going.
