Richard Bosman at Elizabeth Harris - New York

Many of the 11 paintings in Richard Bosman's first solo present to view in New York since 1994 featured the forest-lands lakes and streams of the Adirondacks, occupied by dint of canoes, swimmers or deer. Four wood-paneled interiors depict trophies from the outdoor life. of that kind as deer heads and snowshoes. Compared to Bosman's previous treatments of water and swimmers, which oftentimes portray overwhelming waves and clinging survivors, these canvases have the appearance less neo-Romantic, though still not quite specific enough to be Realist. The new works interpret landscape and related motifs from the plein-air realist painting tradition in the way that a certain quantity of of his paintings of the 1980 reinterpret a figurative tradition from Japanese comics. Where those earlier works limned violence, the works since 2001 are notable for their renunciative, Spartan rigor.

Bosman's turn of expression is often called Neo-Expressionist, since it is broadly brushed. on the contrary like several Neo-Expressionists (and like Alex Katz), he exhibits traditionally emotional icons with deadpan explosion simplicity, rather than creating stridently expressive abstract form. Bosman's frontal, center compositional esthetic could have draw near from an old Kodak Brownie handbook. His brushed gesturings mimic the fluid loopiness of scribbling, on the contrary the contours of important existences are left crisp and straight. His palette, like an LL Bean catalogue, is dominated by means of hunter green, brown, tan and light sky-colored with an occasional pure r or gold-colored accent. The cold light appears overcast and non-specific; highlights are simply whitened. What saves the artist's form from without fault [i]or[/i] blemish [i]or[/i] flaw indifference is high contrast. clean whites are often juxtaposed with dark bottle verdants Wood grain and parquetry are abbreviated using forceful umber lines. In Great Camp (2002) the animal-head trophies have defined shadows behind them upon the wall, as if lit with a bare scaly bud However, he undercuts any specific faculty of perception of light by emphatically outlining the individual stones of the fireplace.

Other painters' interests in atmosphere and fugitive color begin to appear luxurious; what matters here is ferocious animal thingness. All the compositions point aimed at steeply receding floor or surface of land planes against starkly frontal wall planes or masses of foliage. This staginess recalls Neo-Classical Cubism--say late Derain--more than Katz. Intimations of narrative reinforce this event For example, in Lean-to (2002) individual infers campers in sleeping bags upon a rocky ground from sum of two units brightly lit lumpy masses. The cover of their rough-cut shelter appear to bes half collapsed, their surroundings hacked into disarray, on the other hand no matter. They survive their get back to Nature, bracingly.

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group