THE MODERN LANDSCAPE

BY JAYNE BOMBERG

The term landscape brings to the mind's eye a vista from the natural world. But this view has been represented in art as a subject in itself only since the 16^th century. In antiquity, landscapes were highly conventionalized - with a standard way of seeing mountains, rivers, trees and the like - and were painted in subordination to the main image. With the development of perspective during the Renaissance period, landscape became a genre. From this time on, experimentation, and other artistic developments, became a mode of pursuit.

The curator and the artists included in this exhibition use the idea of landscape in a broad sense, including all references to nature. The artists present their unique ideas through creative use of materials. The result is an expanded, extended and elaborated vista of landscape for the 20^th century. With 23 artists in four general groupings: Abstract Interpretations of the Natural World, A Post-Modern Approach: Material and Imaginational Investigations, Traditional Landscapes Re-interpreted Through a Modern Approach, and The Power of Nature, the show explores and defines its title, "The Modern Landscape."

Abstract Interpretations of the Natural World

The first group with corresponding sensibilities share a manipulation of atmosphere. The references to familiar landscapes are recognizable at times, although attempts are made to obscure the attributes, giving the final image an abstracted quality.

In the large color photographs of Pat Kilgore, dense, rich shadows contrast with a highly saturated ultramarine blue or a deep magenta-a suggestion of evening light. The subjects are ambiguous, but at times hazy details with an emotional allusion appear. Kilgore uses intuition to impart a dream-like quality, refraining from consciously composing the scene to be photographed. Other artists, like Katherine Bowling, will focus on this "interior state," a modern condition first emphasized by the Surrealists at the beginning of this century.

Katherine Bowling uses representational photographs as inspiration and documentation from which to paint. The result is a convincing fusion between representational landscapes and abstracted ambiance. On a plywood base, Bowling applies industrial spackle, painting on top in oils. Frequently, the artist sands off layers of paint and uses color to define and create contrasts. These paintings are inspired by nature photographs taken in upper New York State, but the painted views are produced as if from dreams or memories-something far away.

Both the work of Darren Waterston and of Ross Bleckner consciously use old masters' techniques to impart a rich surface texture and a gratifying aesthetic response. Darren Waterston uses oil and beeswax on wood panels, materials of 19^th-century romantic landscape painting. The paintings shimmer from the translucent washes of pigment, the intense layering of paint, and wax mixed with paint. The works emit a stillness transcendent from the actual subjects represented, guiding the viewer into the mystical and mysterious. The varying light through thick and thin layers lends a sense of space; sometimes heavy with moist vegetation, other times light and airy with flickering nuances.

Ross Bleckner, also using traditional oil-painting techniques, manipulates the paints by using light over dark glazes to create transparencies, resulting in a three-dimensional viewing experience. This technique enhances the artist's obsession with physical light by creating a dense and fertile ground upon which floating amorphous and ambiguous forms suggest a movement toward the identifiable. This artist, highly acknowledged with a retrospective of work at the Guggenheim Museum last spring, has extended art into life. Active in the Community Research Initiative on AIDS, Bleckner was one of the first to use AIDS as a subject, in the painting "Hospital Room, 1985." The two untitled paintings included in "The Modern Landscape" could refer to AIDS with the disintegration of forms into cell-like essences. But the artist's exploration of physical light (using the transparencies of glazes), and motion (the reverberations caused by the push-and-pull of three-dimensionality), and purely sensual use of contrasting colors creates a curiosity as to the symbolism employed. Bleckner uses light, a primary ingredient of nature, to broaden the concept of landscape. Evolving from flower shapes are hints of cells, floating in marine-like environments emanating spectral phosphorescence.

Saba Daraee draws with oil sticks on paper, producing mirror images on a single sheet. Suggesting opposing interactions, encouraging free-association on the part of the viewer, the drawings are reminiscent of things in the natural world. In the final form, the works are not directly representative of any particular object. Daraee begins with existing organic shapes of a definable nature, such as seed pods or leaves. These images are rendered in sepia-colored oil stick-which disperses unevenly on the paper-creating an abstraction of delicately filtered, hazy, unrecognizable images but suggestive enough to appear familiar. The small size and intimate manner of Daraee's drawings attract the viewer. The created ephemeral atmosphere, with floating ambiguous forms, connects the viewer with another way of interpreting landscape with organic, abstracted forms derived from nature.

A dream-like quality, heavy atmospheres and soft hazy edges unite these painters. These can be used as models of one type of the modern landscape, and can be placed within the schools of art, like Impressionism, for the reliance on the visual impression over the goal of representation.

A Post-Modern Approach: Material and Imaginational Investigations

The next collection of similar approaches expands the concept of landscape to its fullest range. The modern era continues the retreat from reality, using an explosion of materials and image manipulation. The following group has the sense of the Post-Modern in the extreme variety of pursuits.

H. Mari Pizanis combines natural and man-made materials in her spherical sculptural forms. The result is raw, crude, and unpretentious; fibrous, organic material containing relief qualities. The contours and volume of the work activates an atavistic familiarity, acknowledging human cellular origins as the same as these rounded forms. The possibility of birth and rebirth seems to be echoed in the forms. This landscape relies on an interior view of the artist leading the viewer to an expanded experience through a simple form.

Unlikely materials again are a dominant entry into a personal statement about the toughness and fragility of life. Oliver Herring, a German-born artist, uses common plastic transparent tape, and at times strips of silver mylar, to knit three-dimensional objects of nature - as in "Flower Head." The process of knitting, taking hours of complete meditation, records for Herring the preciousness of time, and serves as homage to fellow artists who are dying from AIDS. The resulting knitted objects are opaque and shiny, resembling snow. They are, Herring states, "metaphors for the struggle to keep living...weaving is a positive statement about life...but with the contradiction in a seemingly fragile material that can unravel or rip." The artist's work again suggests the painful awareness of impermanence in all forms of the natural world.

In relation to the transparent tape, an exciting contrast of materials occurs with the sheet steel sculptures of Ruth Marshall. Using rivets to connect sections of steel, a very modern material, a double "Torso" is formed. Here steel is formed into organic curving body shapes, a subversion to its expected use. The artist deliberately allows evidences of the irregularity in hand cutting and riveting to remain. For Marshall, "making a one of a kind, a precious, individual object rather than a manufactured one," is an inherent quality. A Post-Modern symptom of combining historical references, Marshall uses a Victorian lace pattern screenprinted on the sheets of steel. At the same time, the artist keeps "the pieces looking shiny and 'new', an important ingredient and idea in the modern world." This conflation again offers expansion to the landscape premise.

Brightly colored steel and enamel in the shape of an altered insect is the sculpture by Darin Wacs. The work represents pure pleasure, humor and childhood naiveté. The larger-than-life size can be confrontational, but unlike a live insect that perhaps is pestuous and annoying, the sculpture implies the opposite through its magnetic personality. Wacs uses industrial materials, laser-cut steel fired with colored enamels, to create a playful sculpture.

Art and life's close connection is interpreted in the work of Niizeki Hiromi. A highly unlikely material, almost absurd, is used to make art expressing itself. Hiromi collects junkmail, pulps it into papier-mâché balls and uses these forms to express the "landscape of my life." Each ball contains information particular to the artist's life in a particular time at a particular place. Resting on a bed of cotton in a unique steel case, a group of balls suggests a confinement of Hiromi's personal moments. This type of landscape has a unifying human effect - the universality of receiving annoying junkmail. Recycling provides an endless supply of materials for Hiromi, in addition to considering when, in the material world of "things," enough is enough.

Alison C. Safford admits to using familiar elements of nature-twigs, paper, cotton and wool-as "a method for luring the viewer from a level of seeing to one of interacting." The artist uses contradictions as metaphors for the concepts of enclosure vs. exposure. For example, buds of a willow ready to burst forth are entombed in a tall, narrow structure, reminiscent of mummies. "Five," an assembly of five separate tombs, each filled with twigs, cotton, paper, lead and linen, is the visual statement to the question of "claustrophobic confinement."

Leaving the area of material domination for the prominence of the image and concept as prime carriers of the expanding "Modern Landscape," we look at the paintings of acrylic on wood, again tall and narrow, of Ronald Morosan. As if looking through a doorway, "In All, A Wall" merges various horizontal views, the soft hues of grey and white suggesting atmosphere at the top of the door. In the center, a deep ochre yellow draws one into this earth tone, which is placed next to the dark grey of minerals on a deeper level. Morosan creates conceptual images of a broad approach to the "scape" of land with symbols and metaphors open enough for the viewer to create the narrative.

A study of three different trees extends yet further the freedom presented in manipulating nature. For Adèle Lau Rossetti, the large, detailed charcoal drawing on canvas of a gnarled cherry tree refers to the complexity of views of landscapes, itself a landscaped tree. Trees take on anthropomorphic forms with spots of light and shadow for Nona Hershey. The resulting intimate intaglio print of two trees, the artist describes, "refer to the shared way in which, I imagine, organic forms converse." Brian Novatny uses the Italian Quattrocento sacred sensitivity of an object in a devotional setting for his single "Tree on a Plain." Primitive and magnificent, the tree radiates light, and its perception becomes enlarged, personified and metaphorical. These three artists share the ability to personify a natural form. The viewer can relate ideas of human isolation and alienation with Novatny's single tree. For Rossetti's trees, meaning is found in the complexity of struggle needed for survival. Human emotions can be felt in Hershey's entwined trees.

This collection represents an array of material and imaginational investigations. The modern world continues to offer to the creative mind an endless supply of both, especially when recycling becomes a part of an artist's intent and when creation of an object can become larger than life.

Traditional Landscapes Re-interpreted Through A Modern Approach

The third grouping is the most familiar according to traditional considerations of landscape painting. However, each artist has a unique approach. "The Night of the Redentore in Venice," an oil-on-canvas painting by Sergio Rossetti Morosini, is a familiar vista even if the viewer has not visited the exact location. The large size of this painting confronts us; and the light of the night scene provides an emotional response. Morosini captures the unique quality of Venice's reflecting lights, relating to the viewer the sheer beauty of the very locale and its festivities.

Similarly, the landscapes of David Bates require the viewer's pure emotional interaction. Equally comfortable creating in oils or with cast bronze sculptures, landscapes or references to them, Bates provides interest and fascination through intense coloring and a lyrical playful view into nature. The painting, "Florida," calls to mind the sea vistas of this coastal environment; the sea breeze, swaying palms and the blue-green sea, feeding the viewer's wanderlust.

Janet Gillespie also uses seascapes as subject matter, painted with oil on wood in a realistic manner. But just a charming sea is not enough. Gillespie very cleverly renders details of a "strangely peaceful catastrophe" going on under the deep dark waters, for the artist the dividing line between the conscious and unconscious. Gillespie further defines these hidden elements (sunken ships and land hoes) as "symbolic representations of psychological repression and loss." Gillespie's paintings arouse an intense curiosity with the realization that what is visible is not all there is.

A landscape too near to evaluate, for most, is the information superhighway. Steve Greene shows society's ambivalence by incorporating cast-offs from the modern world in oil, collage-on-canvas paintings. Motors that don't work, discarded tires and upside down carts that don't roll or carry are images Greene uses balanced within areas void of representation. An added quality is the implication of repetition these cast-offs define. Greene's imagery conjures depiction of information and its transmission, but there is an undercurrent judgment-the technological artifacts are overflowing our modern landscape.

Double meanings can again be found in the realistic work of Lawrence Gipe. Large "cinematic scale" oil-on-panel paintings pay homage to the industrial achievements of the modern era, not unlike the goal of the Futurists. Gipe's painting of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge is one of these accomplishments. A winning idea, but it is covered with poster-like silkscreened text reading, "Evidence of Divine Inspiration." At first glance there is agreement between image and text but, there is evidence of painted satire and irony. Political and socially significant content inspire this art and may be its true purpose, but in this case it is not all that arouses interest. As in Greene's work, subtle messages, beyond the images derived initially from photo documentation, sensitize the audience again to reflect on the idealistic view of progress.

The Power of Nature

The final grouping of artists create imaginary, fantastical, lyrical and other-worldly landscapes. The group emerges from atmospheric dream states to a real life of invented, somewhat uncomfortable and almost fearful landscapes.

Challenging traditional ways of seeing, Alexis Rockman evolves from pure illustration of zoological creatures to revelations of nature's fearsome mysteries. Consider the relative ease of viewing the seascapes of Bates and Gillespie, and then notice the discomfort of surveying a foreign and terrifying world under Rockman's water. Approach-avoidance takes over and the audience is tantalized by how close one can come to "scare" and still survive, wanting to believe humans are separate from and in control of the natural world. Coming from a background in botany and zoology, Rockman's imagination is stimulated by images gleaned from science-fiction films, biological illustrations, museum dioramas, and the captivating literature of freaks. One can reference 17^th century Dutch still-life paintings, with exotically painted fruits and fowls, as possessing a similar hyper-realism. Rockman's use of bright colors, like the defined markings animals use for signs of danger or camouflage, coupled with the pervasiveness of the natural world, lends the viewer a sense of humbleness in nature's presence.

Like Rockman's tantalizing underwater landscapes, above ground in one's own backyard, equally exotic are the vertical views of Gregory Crane, using the pervasive draw of color. Walking past "Walled Garden with Crystals (Summer)," out jumps a penetrating cadmium orange background to an animated botanical form like a lush purple-red raspberry. Subtle but dramatic, believable but apprehensive is Crane's imagery, again like Rockman's-"come hither but be careful." Crane is a contemporary interpreter of the modern landscape, explaining, "I allude to the fragility of nature...with the fact that we're in this apocalyptic time." The artist starts with small sketches done en plein air, and refrains from the use of photographs. Crane likes "being removed from the scene and figuring it out from my memory and information in the sketch." These sketches become a "catalogue of events" to be reassembled with enough emotionalism to bring a new way of looking at nature.

An attracting illogical order is first sensed in the compositions of Dennis Masback. Coming in and out of the picture plane are pieces and wholes of fruits and vegetables, abstracted and representative, adrift from the mother plants. Masback's labor intensive process of painting-building up of 40 to 60 layers of acrylic gloss medium on a wood panel-lends a surface quality reminiscent of faded, soft pigments in fragments of frescoes. These atmospheric paintings clearly represent an artificial view of familiar landscapes, metaphoric of the cacophonous fragmented existence of daily life, as in "Immigrant Wedding." Masback maintains a firm command of drawing the viewer in through the serene surfaces of many-layered botanical forms. The viewer is seduced into the sensual luminosity radiating from the painting.