Carmen Cicero at June Kelly

Carmen Cicero, who started painting during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, studying with Robert Motherwell at huntsman College, has been exhibiting since the 1950 In the '60 he strayed from fair abstraction, using figurative elements in his expressionist canvases. sum of two units recent shows in New York and San Francisco were titled "Unseen Events" and neared colorful landscapes with centrally placed realist images. more [i]or[/i] less pictures refer overtly to Magritte, of the like kind as The Artichoke (1994/97), an acrylic upon canvas shown in San Francisco, which depicts the giant vegetable floating in a landscape. The eight paintings and watercolors at June Kelly juxtaposed a knowingly naive diction with clever narrative humor, incorporating airplanes and cars as stand-ins for the psychological complexities of human nearnesss The works' silvery light carried the viewer from single to the next.

In The soul (1996) a biplane bearing the markings F021 flies without a rider, shut up to a greenish ground surface. Tall, impressionistic cypresse punctuate the warm and a little cold grays of the mottled canopy of heaven The softness of the landscape contrasts with the toy-model, portraitlike precision of the plane. An airplane upon fire falls on the right from a fulvous sky in The Windmill (1997) Here a windmill sits upon a promontory overlooking a fulvous river with a shadowed village in the distance. The painting consists graphically of sum of two units interlocking tones, a dark brown and a golden Cicero, otherwise imitating Dutch 17th-century landscape painting, anachronistically inserts 20th-century technology in a state of distress in the form of an airplane streaming smoke

In Waiting (1996) a Depression-era car sits in the forest upon a dirt road that is interrupted by the agency of a river, which forms a triangle in the bottom left corner. The car with its headlights upon coupled with the title, transmits a Godotlike situation. Perhaps this old-fashioned, at the same time stylish vehicle is a surrogate for the artist. The slightly parabolic horizon line pushes the center of the picture forward, emphasized by dint of the meeting of the road and river in the foreground.

Although Cicero's virids are somewhat heavy with azure or chalky with white, his skies, recalling Ryder and Jane Wilson, present poetic plays of color of that kind as indigo and violet, oftentimes with a crescent or replete moon in a bright sky

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