Suzanne Scherer and Pavel Ouporov at Turner Carroll

American-born Suzanne Scherer and Russian-born Pavel Ouporov are a husband-and-wife artist team who met in Moscow in 1989 while both were studying at the Surikov Academy of Art. They have since produced a collaborative body of work encompassing painting, mixed-medium construction and performance that draws on Russian icon painting, figurative realism and medieval manuscript illumination as well as Russian Symbolist and Futurist poetry.

This exhibition's title, "Celestial Alphabet," is inspired by the practice of deriving sacred writing from the configurations of the stars. The show comprised over 15 mixed-medium paintings from 2004, featuring idyllic nude portraits of the couple's newborn child and of a young male figure, all set in fantastical landscapes studded with lustrous letters. Varying in size, the works are rendered primarily in egg tempera, casein and gold leaf on wood panels. Alongside a preoccupation with universal aspects of language, the works evinced the artists' interest in theology, the human psyche, and acts of creation and regeneration. The cherubic child, a slumbering blond infant with exquisite peach and roseate skin tones, is frequently framed by the tangled branches of a Banyan tree (an ancient symbol of fertility) against cerulean night skies with pale blue washes and whirlpools of silvery blue characters punctuated with metallic specks. The open-ended threadlike shapes of these obscure letters--variants of the Hebrew alphabet--are also meant to evoke chromosomal genetic sequences.

In contrast to the child, who seems in peaceful coexistence with the celestial environments, the young man, depicted in semi-crouched positions, is tightly confined inside recessed niches that evoke Renaissance altarpieces. Isolated from his eerie paradisiacal surroundings, he exudes a pensive melancholy. The figure/background juxtapositions are apt metaphors for psychological and spiritual estrangement.

The artists favor painstaking, labor-intensive techniques. These range from the mottling of delicate chisel-marks on the wooden surfaces to the remarkable combinations of texture, tone and shadow effected by meticulous crosshatching and the gilding process in which the moisture of the artists' breath helps adhere the gold. These features imbue their subject matter with a mystical bent and emotive depth.

In today's climate of violence and religious intolerance, this revival of antique techniques and ancient modes of thought seems a fitting way for Scherer and Ouporov to pursue their visionary search for cosmic unity.

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