Sights for sore feet

Long journey around sprawling Artropolis had some pleasant stops

Judging from a lot of eavesdropping and testimony from my own feet, the most lasting impression of Artropolis, the constellation of art fairs that ended Monday at the Merchandise Mart, is that it was big. Maybe too big.

"This is enough art to last me 20 years," a daunted-looking man told his friend in one crowded corridor. Said another, "Who can look at it all?"

I know I couldn't. With about 16,000 artworks in about 230,000 square feet of display space, Artropolis was one enormous spectacle, and no one -- even the most insatiable art zombies who plodded through the various floors every hour of the four-day show, stopping only for revivifying slugs of Grolsch -- could possibly have given more than the smallest fraction of it anything like the focused, sustained attention that a substantive encounter with art demands. At times the sheer art overload made me dizzy.

(It's a phenomenon that predates art fairs. Stendhal's syndrome, named after the 19th century French author who described being overwhelmed by an excess of art-viewing in the city of Florence, is also familiar to anyone who dares to stroll too long through, say, the Art Institute of Chicago or the Metropolitan Museum in New York.)

The best I could do at Artropolis was to see what stopped me. There was, I'm happy to report, quite a bit of stopping, often in front of works by Chicago artists.

For the second year in a row, for example, I found myself sucked into the gravitational field of the busy, information-packed yet oddly unified work of painter Sarah Krepp, whose latest pieces, in the Roy Boyd Gallery booth at Art Chicago, featured three-dimensional protrusions from their surfaces. At once cerebral and sensual, her work envelops you in an intoxicating world of portent and color -- often a rich, vaguely sinister mix of red and black -- and makes you wonder why she isn't world-famous. She should be.

Another painter whose work stopped me -- in New Insight, a show of graduate-student work curated by the Renaissance Society's Susanne Ghez and coordinated by, wouldn't you know it, Sarah Krepp -- is Angel Ortero, from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Otero's abstract paintings generate an eerie energy in the collision not of colors (though they do jangle mightily) but of textures. Large areas of the canvas are painted thinly and flatly, set off by select swaths of thick impasto brushwork that rise off the canvas like mountains from a desert; the result is sculptural and dynamic. Here's an artist to watch.

In the Artist Project, this year's much-expanded show of work by artists "undiscovered by the gallery community," as Mart president Chris Kennedy has delicately put it, painting -- an entry-level medium for many artists -- was ubiquitous but often lacked polished execution, a strong conceptual basis or both.

I was drawn, instead, to a number of artists working in various forms of collage that feel inspired in part by Joseph Cornell, obviously, but also by Chicago collage master Tony Fitzpatrick. They included Ken Wilson, who transforms window frames salvaged from old buildings (often with the original pulls and sliding mechanisms still attached) into display cases for painting-drawing-collage portraits of surprising density, delicacy and feeling.

Even better is the ingenious, witty and yet strangely poignant work of Kass Copeland, whose sculptural collages repurpose dresser drawers, vintage photographs and other era-evoking flea-market finds (themselves transformed or turned inside-out, as in the case of the clock mechanism in "The Peace Machine" of 2008). For this footsore art zombie, she was the find of the Artist Project. Discover her -- before the rest of the world does, as it almost inevitably will -- at www.kasscopeland.com.