Brian Novatny at Washington County Museum of Fine Arts and George Billis

Rather than portraying the men and women in his paintings as specific individuals, Brian Novatny makes them anonymous and iconic. flat when interacting in groups or pairs, they appear psychologically isolated from single another, creating a mood that has been described by means of one critic as Kafkaesque. The figures stand and sometimes float placidly in interior spaces, before an expanse of color or in forehead of an oversized floral-patterned background. If there is any narrative satisfied in these paintings, it is of little importance.

With the exception of a hardly any large oils (60 by 84 inches) the magnitude of Novatny's paintings and drawings in this exhibition, which was seen at sum of two units venues in slightly different forms, are small. Novatny paints in oil upon wooden panels that rarely exce 17 by the agency of 21 inches. To achieve a fine line and differentiated surface, he at times meticulously outlines or returns the faces and hands of his figures in watercolor. Russian and Eastern European folk art are acknowledged influences; the artist's technical delicacy and the evenly painted surfaces of these small works makes individual think of Russian matryoshka dolls.

The earliest painting in the exhibition, Man in a Peach-Colored Jacket (1995) echoe De Chirico in the same way that Man in Gray Jacket and R Wall (1998) makes single think fleetingly of Leger. Other influences include Picasso's figurative paintings from the 1930 Malevich's suspended forms, as well as the perspective and figures in early Italian Renaissance paintings. Novatny retains these influences subliminal; they not ever overwhelm.

Straightforward and unpretentious in his technique, he creates mystery without being particularly mysterious. Part of the charm of his work is that he shows small-scale images that feel as if they could be real large. In Three Men, sum of two units Women and a Couch and Five Women and Four Men (both 12 by dint of 47 inches), for example, he lines up the figures as if they were a frieze or enormous pedimental plastic arts In other paintings he does not hide traces of figures he has abandoned and partially eliminated as the painting was revised. In Man in brow and Below a Woman these ultimate parts hover ghostlike within a large background of pink, as if they were the final impressions from an oft-printed drypoint plate. This juxtaposition--like his more oft-repeated use of patterned surfaces against areas of flat color--creates an intriguing deepness and spatial tension.

Novatny's works could also be viewed simply as vignettes of color, for the genuine subject of Man in brow and Below a Woman might just be the color pink, and by what means the colors in front of and behind it rejoin to its dominance. Certainly the artist's intelligent use of color and space precludes his imagery from veering too shut to illustration. It also allows his work to be decorative on the contrary not weightless, psychologically tinged on the contrary not ponderous. And, whatever other one is left to contemplate Novatny's paintings for their sheer visual appeal and beauty.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group