Longyear Show: Frank Manzo Memorial Exhibit, Cena Pohl Crane: New Member Exhibition

“Figures in Motion: The Paintings of Cena Pohl Crane.”

by Alan Powell

   Cena Pohl Crane is currently presenting her first mini-solo exhibition at the Longyear Gallery in Margaretville, New York. Cena describes herself as a figurative painter whose work moves beyond the constraints of realism. Working from images in her imagination, she paints freely, using large, gestural strokes and a vibrant mixture of colors.

    Her paintings draw upon the practices of German Expressionism, a 20th-century art movement that prioritized the artist’s inner emotional state and subjective perception of the world. Cena credits German Expressionist painter Max Beckmann as a major influence. Beckmann described his own approach as “brutal realism.” Cena’s work also recalls the subject matter of New York’s Ashcan School, whose artists portrayed everyday urban life and groups of people rather than concentrating solely on traditional portraiture.

    The first painting encountered upon entering Cena’s exhibition is a triptych titled “Late to the Party.” Groups of people in 1920s evening dress huddle together over drinks and conversation. The viewer sees only fragments of their faces, shifting the narrative away from individual personalities and toward the playful arrangement of human forms. Each plane of color defines another body or gesture—a hand, a face, or the curve of a figure.

    Cena explains that during the COVID-19 pandemic, she often dreamed about crowds of people. These dreams expressed both a longing for social contact and a fear of the infectious air surrounding such gatherings. Looking at the painting, viewers may feel as though they have arrived late to the party and must search for an opening into the crowded room.

    The second painting, “Tightrope Walker,” shows the legs, torso, and arms of a performer attempting to maintain her balance. Subtle gestures of her fingers and arms, together with the tilt of her body, suggest her precarious position above the blurred faces and bodies of the audience below. The performer’s face is withheld from view, as are the points where her slippers meet the rope. Instead, the viewer is held within a suspended moment as the tightrope walker struggles to regain her balance.

    The third painting, “The Modern Family,” refers to an episode of the television series in which members of the Dunphy family argue about attending a Pearl Jam concert. In Cena’s painting, a man’s body appears to float as it clings to waves of powerful brushstrokes bursting with color and raw, forceful gestures.

     Cena states, “In the 1970s, we had the courage to bash forward. Now my son’s generation is accosted by a raging sea of information and digital chaos.” The turbulent composition reflects this sense of a younger generation attempting to remain afloat amid an overwhelming current of media and information.

     A fourth painting, “Transfiguration,” places a figure within a Futurist- and Cubist-inspired space. The viewer struggles to distinguish the front of the figure from the back or to determine which side of the torso is visible. The body appears to twist and turn in search of a resting position. Numerous layers of paint heighten this sense of movement and time, both in the visual construction of the figure and in the artist’s process of layering paint, gestures, and ideas.

    On the opposite wall, a fifth painting places a young boy wearing a baseball cap between two men engaged in conversation. The figures evoke working-class people of the 1930s or 1940s. Each person wears a hat that appears to signify a particular social role or status. The viewer is left to consider the relationship among the three figures. The scene could represent the ordinary interaction of a father and son meeting another man in a public place. Yet the boy’s position, graphically confined between the two adults, may also introduce an unsettling sense of vulnerability and invite questions about the nature of the adults’ conversation or transaction.

    The final painting hangs near the entrance to the Longyear Gallery. Its execution is much looser than that of the other works in the exhibition. Cena explains that the piece did not begin as a figurative painting. It started as a purely abstract composition, from which the image of a body gradually emerged through the painted gestures.

Cena Pohl-Crane has been painting for 30 years. This exhibition reflects those decades of practice, as well as her confident understanding of the human figure, the expressive possibilities of paint, and the subjects that continue to occupy her imagination.

Cena Pohl Crane Artist Statement:

    I am a figurative painter who creates work that moves beyond the constraints of realism.Though my training is academic, I utilize a palette of deeply saturated color combinedwith energetic brushwork that allows me to prioritize emotional resonance overrepresentational likeness. I prefer to work with oil on canvas for its luminous properties,its ability to capture reflective light, and the capacity to contrast thin, layered washes with loose areas of opacity.
My process is one of discovery rather than documentation; I do not work from life or
photography. Instead, I begin by making spontaneous marks on the canvas, leaning into the materiality of the medium. I then interpret this chaos, pulling figures out or pushing landscapes back, responding to the feeling that the emerging shapes elicit. This method allows me to give form to unrecognized and unspoken feelings. In the early stages of creation, I have no preconception of what a painting should communicate. Instead, the image discloses subconscious meaning through the act of creation, often revealing themes of melancholy, anxiety, or the uneasy comfort found between figures.

    For me, painting is a way of making sense of a fractured world—a process of healing in the hope that a viewer will pause, look, and find comfort in a shared emotional
experience.

Memorial Exhibition for Frank Manzo

By Alan Powell

   Frank Manzo was a founding member of the Longyear Gallery in Margaretville. He also exhibited his photographs at the Roxbury Arts Group, the Salmagundi Club, and the Catskill Center’s Erpf Gallery. Trained as an architect, Manzo pursued an accomplished career as a photographer for more than fifty years.

     What is particularly striking about this memorial exhibition is the strength of Manzo’s eye, both as a photographer and as a printmaker. His black-and-white, silver-based photographs are beautifully composed and masterfully printed. Whether working in landscape or portraiture, he demonstrated a strong sense of structure, balance, and visual clarity. These photographs reflect the classic sensibility of late twentieth-century 35mm photography. The single etching included in the exhibition reveals the same sensitivity to the art of printmaking, whether working from a photographic negative or an etched plate.

    Manzo’s transition from silver-based photography to digital photography and archival inkjet printing preserved his strong compositional instincts while allowing him to develop a more playful and fluid use of color. His color photographs invited him to explore the natural world through muted tones, fog, atmosphere, and texture.

     What struck me most about the exhibition was the thoughtful grouping of the images. Connections emerge among the works through recurring subjects, compositional choices, and visual themes. Together, the photographs reveal the consistency of Manzo’s artistic vision while also demonstrating his willingness to experiment and evolve throughout his long career.

Artist Statement about photography

“Since photographs strive to capture the visual effect of the temporal changes in light that lend an atmospheric sense to a two dimensional image and the quality and changes of light inform the image, assuring that each image is unique, the challenge is to create both an interesting composition with painterly qualities that resent to the viewer more than one interpretation, thus allowing one to see different aspects each time it is viewed.”