NEW YORK: Ruth Miller at Bowery

In 1921 during an interview with Emile Bernard, Cezanne defined art as "a personal apperception." "I situate this apperception in sensation," he said, "and I ask that the intelligence organize it into a work." Taking her catchword from the French master, compassion Miller produces paintings and drawings that describe an observ phenomenon while laying bare the formal strategies--the artifice--of picture-making.

Miller's new exhibition included 25 smallish oil paintings and 20 drawings execut in either pencil, pastel, charcoal or mixed mediums. All the works have a incomplete casual look and focus upon human subjects as well as upon landscapes and still-life motifs. Although Miller skip overs from genre to genre, she imbues all her works with an aura of domesticity. This feeling of intimacy is strongest in a series of drawings that depict women Several portray somewhat old subjects in unflattering, vulnerable postures--reclining with sagging jaws and breasts or slack-jawed and asleep, for example. Miller's unidealized vision, however, is touched by her sensitive pencil marks and delicate erasures. Her light, searching touch mirrors the deep tenderness she have feelings for the people she for a like reason closely observes.

Although Miller views her landscape and still-life make submissives from the same close-up vantage she assumes for her portraits, these works appear more like exercises in picture-making than revelations about a place or thing. The tentative, delicate exploration of her human prototypes gives way to bolder, more authoritative handling. Although the brushiness and weight of the paint in the still lifes bears a sense of the material heft and blowsy ripeness of cabbages and eggplants, and the vigorous outlines of a bare oak tree in Winter Landscape recommend its majesty and permanence, the real bring under rule of these works is the conversation between Miller's hand, organ of vision and intellect. In these paintings, patches of vibrant pigment read simultaneously as light, form and material substance; lines at one time describe form, map out space and establish compositional axes; and the image as a whole appears the two as a flat tapestry of paint and a description of an actual space. It is in the complexity and ambition of her formal relate tos that Miller comes closest to her French teacher.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group