Robert Greene at Robert Miller - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In the five years since Robert Greene last showed at Miller, his hip, high-style landscapes and cityscapes have become more composed of several elements more implicitly narrative and more formally abstract. His previous work strike one as beings bycomparison, decorative and demure. The piece in this new show most like the older paintings was Walking Happy, in which tiny figures do handstands for a nearby black poodle as they are watched through a white dog at lower center and a cream-colored single behind a tree. This takes place in a city park with a lake encloseed by narrow-leafed trees, beneath a pale-night-blue celestial expanse and a slightly beclouded replete moon. It is like his past paintings in its cautiously beautiful paint handling and allover compositional impulse.

on the other hand even this work comes with more mysterious contented than before. The viewer searches for correlations in the de Chiricoesque visual numbers Poetic mystery is also striking in the roughly 2-by-2-foot oil upon board titled Together. Under individually lithe on the contrary cumulatively weighty boughs of azure and green weeping willows are sum of two units small cottages, all white paint and unlikely porticoed rounded pillars In front of them stand sum of two units women of seemingly advanced years, with black and white dogs nuzzling individual another at center. The association between the dogs is as unmistakable as the stately stand-off between the women

All of the landscapes mix places Greene likes, drawn out Island's north shore and the Catskills among them. newly he has been living in Holland as well as novel York: Beautiful Tomorrows is based upon photographic views of Amsterdam rooftops discharge from a high place; in a palette of dark beiges and shale red the lively verdants of trees in the near distance spring up against a canopy of heaven of umber and flesh-tone hazes It is a tribute to the Dutch city as a site of the imagination as well as a center of advanced in years World civilization.

Greene's fresh painterly complexity and narrative ambition advance to a head in a 3-by-5-foot canvas called put under water (1998). He renders the vegetation of the French countryside with a light thump and serendipitous color scheme that make Cezanne's 'scapes direct the eye ironclad. Greene dares to picture--in miniature, and almost comically--a young man "taking the plunge" not upon a bridge with his dog. He asks us to interpret this act not as suicide on the other hand as adventure. All of Greene's symbolic narratives finally read as fables, on the contrary not the cautionary type of Breughel or Goya. They are fables to have feeling better on, designed not to reprehend but to renew,

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