Artist Paints An Unconscious Epic

In one sense, the scene in Jonathan Wilner​‘s painting Under the El is very quiet. Three figures each occupy their own space in a wide, vaulted hallway. They don’t seem to acknowledge each other. We can’t even discern their faces. The action is all in the architecture. Maybe the columns are encrusted with decorations. Or maybe they’re liquifying, flowing upward into the ceiling. The whole place is melting into the sky, and the three people in the painting don’t even seem to notice.

What does it mean? For the Catskills-based artist — whose fantastical works are on display in ​“Mindscapes: A Journey Into the Unconscious,” up now through April 6 at the DaSilva Gallery on Whalley Avenue — creating the story is part of the art of it.

“Inspired by the possibilities introduced to the arts by André Breton’s Surrealist manifesto, the conflation of dreaming and wakeful consciousness, this exhibit explores the alchemy produced when one reaches into the unconscious when awake,” Wilner writes in an accompanying artist statement. ​“The implications of the liminal forms remain a mystery to both creator and viewer. And it is in this unknowing that the artist can yield to the repressed images which surface. The artist, in effect, dreams while wide awake.”

But Wilner also takes a first step in interpreting the images he has created. There is ​“a creeping awareness of mortality which binds all humanity. But there is also the possibility of transcendence — something which awaits us perhaps at the other end.” But then, pleasantly and a little playfully, he stops short. ​“The rest is up to the viewer to decipher,” Wilner writes. ​“Each piece is a narrative, though incomplete. The viewer has the task of offering a conclusion.”

That the paintings are preoccupied with the end of things is pretty clear from the works themselves. Their cityscapes are depopulated, looking more like the ruins of places where people once lived than functioning cities where people live now. The colors of the skies in Wilner’s paintings are unsettlingly unnatural, as if they’re constantly reflecting the light from distant, oily fires. Something has changed and can’t be put back the way it was, and it doesn’t look like it’s good.

Another of Wilner’s paintings also partakes of the apocalyptic taking on Biblical terms. We’re in a gallery of statues, and we appear to be the one ones around. There’s that bronze light again, coming out of the heavens. The statues begin as human forms, but are shifting into something else.

It has more than a little foreboding in it. But there’s something almost circus-like about the shapes of the statues, even if we can’t tell what they are. A clowning human. A prancing horse. A seal playing with a ball, maybe. There aren’t quite enough details to figure out what the statues are. Rendered less ambiguously is the liquid rushing across the floor in a wave. If we came to this gallery to save ourselves from the tide, it appears we’re too late. Perhaps the tide will rise to flood the gallery. Perhaps nowhere is safe.

But — as the artist statement makes plain and the paintings themselves suggest — Wilner isn’t simply a messenger of doom. There’s movement, and therefore hope, to be found in his paintings as well.

Nocturnal Consternation feels less concerning than celebratory, as two figures embrace in what looks like a kiss. Are they angels who found each other? Or is it a human being visited by an angel, whose kiss causes the human to sprout wings?

Then there’s Heavenly City, which is a much larger and more dramatic painting than it appears in this photograph of it. The city on the hill is being doused in the light from a much, much larger city floating in the clouds above it, like an impossibly large spacecraft. It’s hard to say whether the light blazing down onto the city is a source of salvation, destruction, or both. But it gets at the narrative that Wilner suggested in his artist’s statement. In fact, in taking Wilner’s task to heart, it’s possible to construct a narrative out of all of the paintings in ​“Mindscapes,” like they’re scenes from an ongoing epic.

The one I put together was about a metropolis beset by a series of slow-moving catastrophes from which there is no escape. In desperation, a few of its citizens turn to angels to save them, and astonishingly, the angels respond. However, the visiting power that the angels bring with them to answer the people’s prayers may or may not be worse than the calamities that the people already face. The heavenly city saves the people by destroying the earthly city — and it’s unclear whether ​“ascending to a heavenly city” is a euphemism for death, or a form of a better life.

Or something like that.

Or am I reading too much into it?