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Art at Affirmations: Eleinko goes X-Rated! (Well, sorta)

Gary Eleinko's Works on Paper exhibit runs through October 1st. For information, contact: Maureen Jones at 248-398-7105. Or, art curator Charles Alexander ([email protected])

For a night with five important local art openings happening at the same time, artist Gary Eleinko's Works on Paper Exhibit at the Affirmations Art Gallery space drew a record crowd of 200 viewers last Friday, kicking off the traditional fall art season with exceptional flair.
Eleinko, whose art resume lists participation in over 129 gallery shows over a 30-year period and who has a loyal following in the metropolitan Detroit area, exhibited 22 new or recent works. His show is X-Rated, figuratively – that is, metaphorically – speaking.
(Competing exhibits opened at Detroit's Scarab Club, the Wayne State University Graduate Art Gallery, Ferndale's Paramount Bank Art Gallery, and the Johanson Charles Gallery in Detroit's Eastern Market. A few gallery hoppers – including this out-of-breath reviewer – took in all venues.)
With the exception of one of Eleinko's art pieces, "A Muse," (the persistent viewer will get its visual erotic jesting) the X-rating is something of a misnomer. The X design configuration appears in most of his works. His show is theme and variations using the X spacing as a point of unification for each piece.
"My work utilizes geometric elements, including rectangular prisms, X's, an XY combination (the male gene), triangles and patterns. These shapes and symbols," says Eleinko, are appealing in art because of the myriad number of meanings assigned to them, from mathematical, religious, gender, historic, to concepts such as convergence, expansion, compartmentalizing, and balance.
"At times these shapes and symbols are more minimal, and color becomes an important part of the structural components."
There is a direct and earthy simplicity to Eleinko's work. His choice of colors and tones are warm, sun-baked rich, harkening of growth, soil, solidarity, deep rooting. There are intimations of Georgia O'Keefe, Southwest Pueblo, care worn orthodox church vestments, minimalist hints of Eleinko's own Ukrainian heritage.
Because his work appears on the surface to be simple, unembellished, lacking in visual content — doesn't readily "tell a story" — there's a tendency to look quickly and move on piece by piece. In doing so, much of his work's subtlety and nuance gets overlooked. His pieces are meditative. Nourishing. Requesting of viewer input.
Eleinko challenges us to draw upon our own visual, poetic, and subliminal insights to fully complement the experience. "There's never hurry to art. Hurry is in the eye of the beholder."
Eleinko's X-based geometric format is used to excellent introspective advantage in his, "For Felix Gonzalez-Torres," a simple watercolor/collage tribute to the noted Cuban artist who died from AIDS-related causes in 1996. ("For Torres" includes paper items distributed at his Guggenheim Museum retrospective that year.)
"I'm happy to have been invited to show my work here," says Eleinko. "I have many friends outside of the LGBT community. Most, if not all of them, are allies. The Affirmations art gallery space is an important portal of contact. Art speaks the fluent language of diversity."
Music for the evening was provided by pianist Cory Quin, volunteering his time and improvisational talent at the Affirmations well-tuned (member-donated) stylish baby grand. Catering provided by Pronto of Royal Oak, with generous and bountiful culinary augmentation by Gary Alnico.

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