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A young fan walks along the artwork on the Superior Viaduct Saturday at ArtExpoCleveland.
(Peter Chakerian, special to Cleveland.com)
CLEVELAND, OH—Sometimes the beauty of an event is as much about the surroundings as it is the event itself. Such is the case with ArtExpoCleveland, running this weekend on the Superior Viaduct bridge.
This takes nothing away from the myriad of gorgeous work on display there. But to see captured beauty surrounded by such glorious views only emphasizes both as being more than just a sum of their parts.
The brainchild of local artist and entrepreneur Paul Sykes, the president of Art-2-You.com, ArtExpoCleveland is a concept he brought to Cleveland after his participation similar events all over the United States.
Sykes figured if the concept of an outdoor, urban art show with some non-traditional formatting was successful in major markets like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, it could work here. And it certainly does, even if the inaugural scale of it is smaller than those long-standing counterparts.
The ArtExpoCleveland launch recalled early Pop-Up City events—those brilliant, temporary events/installations spearheaded by the Kent State University Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative that occupy vacant and underutilized buildings and land.
Artist Jenna Fournier poses with her epic work "The Queen Sculpture."
Small on scale, big on impact, ArtExpoCleveland has much higher (and higher price-tagged) aims, though time will most certainly expand this gem.
The buzz during Friday night's VIP event at the adjacent Luca Italian restaurant (tucked neatly into the Cuyahoga County Engineer's Building) and Saturday's warm-weather traffic all but confirmed that.
The event, which ends its runs Sunday from noon- 5 p.m., features some stunning works including erotic soul-realism by Frenchman Yarek Godfrey, symbolically suggestive works from Dominican Republic expat Mariela Moode, and local painters and mixed-media artists LinZhao Zhao and Jenna Fournier.
It couldn't have been planned any better, particularly in how the artistic heat and passion paired with the unseasonably warm weather gracing the event.
Godfrey's softened lines and curves in his gauzy, sepia-steeped nudes and partials recalled everything from Greco-Roman sculpture to the spirit one would expect in the gossamer view of French bedchamber eroticism.
Moode's works "The Conductor" and "The Violin Within," for example, radiate warmth—replete with hot-color strokes and swathed in brush wisps that brought the mania and chaos of music performance into visual order.
And Fournier's mammoth triptych "The Queen Sculpture" was equally explosive in color, and grand in both scale in nature—somewhere in between Dodgson's "Alice in Wonderland" and dizzying surreal metaphor.
So epic, in fact, that Fournier's 15-foot dream-like exploration could hardly be contained in the stall it was featured in.
Visit ArtExpoCleveland at www.artexpocleveland.com.
Chakerian is a freelance writer living in Bay Village.