If you go up Zhongshan North Road near the Taipei American School you'll find the old shop for chic dresses gone. In its place is now a bustling restaurant with perhaps the tastiest pizza in town, among other things. It is Scoozi (for the Italian "scuzsi," meaning "excuse me") with its huge sign painted parrot green over the entrance.
Once acclimatized, you will realize you are not only in a pleasant new culinary world, but in a world of flamboyant art, of spicy, tangy food for the emotions. The restaurant, in fact, doubles as an art gallery, and the one-man show now up on the walls of both floors for the next couple of months and making its unadvertised debut for the artist, is the first-ever public showing of watercolors, acrylics and oil paintings by veteran American landscape architect Robert Egan.
Landscape architects are fond of drawing and creating images from, with and of nature. In the case of Robert Egan, some of the most charming drawings I have seen are his sketches of California dwellings and seasides, filled as they are with his lyrical pencil lines that caress the trees and houses, and dance dappled shadows onto the sunlit ground.
In those days, he had already an uncommon eye for lines forever in joyful motion, and managed to incite them no matter what he was rendering. But over the past two decades, the urge has been to break out of the limner's realm, where forms are encased and confined and their boundaries glorified, as in so many sketches of landscapes or landscaped dwelling complexes that enliven the notebooks of architects.
A rumbling began in the early 1990s, when Egan's erstwhile lighthearted sketches began to behave more like paintings, and the watercolors became heavier, turning into acrylics saturated with opacity and a new complexity. The yellows and oranges of the sketch-like paintings now darkened, turning into bluish magentas that seek conflict with teal greens in an onrush of broad and energetic clashing currents. The struggle is between the warm, burning tones of the greens and the fiery ice of the blues, between harmony and conflict, where on many occasions it is the tension in unresolved riddles that reigns triumphant.
But these are part and parcel of a genuine artist's life in art. There is no attempt to pose as something one is not, to present an image that does not come straight from the guts, or to select only a "representative" group that would cohere to reinforce some kind of profound "artist's statement." The paintings in this debut are, in fact, a miniature retrospective, pulling together different types of works from the past 15 years or so that Egan has worked and lived in east Asia, with Taiwan as his base.
Innocent exuberance celebrating the enchantment of form of the early 1990s can be seen gradually to give way to a growing inner turbulence that finds expression in ever-broader strokes in ever more abstract movements. In Egan's eye the powerful passion inherent in seething tropical island scenes acquires a compelling undercurrent of deep, ominous foreboding, as if some unconscious loathing or fear would sweep all form and color into some black hole of annihilation.
Egan's most recent works are often entirely nonfigurative and tend to converge in pounding beats, as if imploding from beyond cognition toward a central fatality in tidal waves of grays, magentas, even eerie greens and reds like haunting aurora borealis, growing in vehemence as they converge toward a center of convoluted discord.
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