“Hotel of Happiness” at the Flint Park Gallery, Brooklyn Paintings by Annika Connor and Teodor Dumitrescu Written by Evan Sung Images courtesy the artists

If we had to pinpoint a prime reason for the very existence of art, a good candidate would surely be this: happiness, beauty and joy just don’t last very long. Not to get all fatalistic on your ass, but face it, we’ve all wanted to hold onto that one moment just a little bit longer. So what do we do? We take a picture. We write a journal entry. We sketch it. We associate a song with it. Such is the irresistible lure of nostalgia.

And now, here come two young artists, Annika Connor and Teodor Dumitrescu with their too-brief, two-person installation/exhibit “Hotel of Happiness” to remind us just how fleeting beauty can be. Hosted at the new Flint Park Gallery in Brooklyn Heights, “Hotel of Happiness” offers up a small, intimate collection of the two artists’ watercolors and oils. First-time curators Lisa Pettersson and Milena Hoegsberg, Art History graduates of Columbia University, selected and arranged the small-scaled works around Flint Park’s cozy residentia gallery space, which does a fine job of living up to the show’s romantic title.

Love In The Afternoon - Annika Connor

Exhibiting an almost girlish affection for lush, vibrant colors, Annika Connor’s watercolors present enigmatic, stolen scenes reproduced from the artist’s own photographs. With titles like “Love in the Afternoon” (not to be confused with The Starland Vocal Band’s “Afternoon Delight”) and “September Sunshine,” these unabashedly sentimental works occasionally skirt the edge of bathos. But it is the honesty and vigor of the sentiment that wins over the more skeptical viewer. Most of the pieces are small enough to fit in a palm (or two) and are enameled over with a high lacquer sheen. Annika told NewYorkCool that she wanted to give the pieces a “jewel-like” aspect, and indeed, they are occasionally reminiscent of long-buried Victorian heirlooms. One particularly successful work, entitled “Love Song,” has an elliptical quality that hints more obliquely at the forgotten, or barely recovered moment that Annika seeks to recreate in her works. Evocative of Matisse in its composition, with a dense patterning in the wallpaper and chair upholstery that hints at inspiration from Edouard Vuillard, “Love Song” is nevertheless unburdened by its inspirations and seems like the clearest statement of the artist’s original voice and vision.

Annika Connor	Teodor Dumitrescu

As if in direct response to the lively color, Teodor Dumitrescu’s watercolors on paper and blocks of wood seem like worn stills from an imaginary Depression era film set in the dust bowl of the United States. Sepia-toned and cinematic in their subject matter and composition, Teodor’s works also flirt aggressively with sentimental nostalgia. But on closer inspection, many of Teodor’s pieces hide little mysteries, little flights of absurdity or incongruity, that throw into question any easy assumptions about the imagery.

Heroes - Teodor Dumitrescu

The lovely diptych “Heroes” is an example. In the first panel we see a smiling young girl in what looks like an aged and faded old Polaroid. In the second, an unknown man bends over peering into a dirt hole, a grave? But what is that on his jacket? Looking closer, we see a rope tied to his coat, pulled taut by something higher and out of view. And rising out of the hole in the earth, another rope, maybe the same one, rising up noose-like to the man’s neck. Is he suspended from and by himself? And why does his fedora lie suggestively by the hole, its front third cut cleanly away? Questions follow upon questions, and nothing is as we thought it would be. And what do we make of the recurrent tri-color bands of Red, Yellow and Blue that haunt each painting? As it turns out, the felicitous correspondence of the colors of Teodor’s native Romanian flag with the primary colors that are at the origin of all painting.

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