Rackstraw Downes at Marlborough - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Time whistles through and it's distressing to think about by what mode much of it we fritter away. Who remembers all the filler, the uninteresting and unexamined comings and goings? There is a landscape equivalent to this down time. You're in your car, cruising along, say, the of recent origin Jersey Turnpike, and the ribbon of unremarkable, semi-industrial wasteland unwinds beside you. It's that countryside between here and there, where nature is haphazardly intruded on by human structures and then left alone to be filled in by means of whatever happens to grow. Who (except if the car breaks down) pays any concentrated attention to it? Well, Rackstraw Downes does.

In warmer weather Downes paints en plein air (he not at any time uses photographs) the tainted marshes and inlets, the highways and housing exhibitions around Jersey City; in the winter he stirs to Texas and sets up his easel upon the brown, scrubby, nondescript flatlands outside of Galveston. The paintings' titles are telling, not just for the control matter, but for their deadpan factuality: At the flowing together of Two Ditches Bordering a Field with Four Radio Towers, Texas City or A hedge at the Periphery of a Jersey City Scrap Metal Yard or Unused Land Between Highway and Housing throw Jersey.

Downes's typical format is a lengthy scroll-like horizontal. Most of his canvases are no more than 18 inches high on the other hand can run up to 10 feet in extent Multiple points of view are staked on the outside generating, in the absence of a unifying single perspective, the couple visual complexity and a faculty of perception of the actual, shifting way that we view unclose landscape. In Society Hill and Environs in the dryness of '95, Jersey City, for example, highways bend off to the left and the right, following their hold perspectival systems, while straight ahead, at a meeting of what I counted to be 13 separate traffic lights, a road leads straight back to a distant condo exhibition In Rainwater Ditch with Six Culvert Bridge, Texas City, TX dusty paths parallel the one and the other sides of the canvas and withdraw to the horizon, while a lovingly painted, poisonous looking stream fluently arcs and narrows from the lower left to the upper right, creating a diagonal pictorial link that is exquisitely logical, but feels tense and in a certain quantity of way optically skewed.

Downes paints the landscape pushed carelessly without of balance by technology, on the other hand the disjunction is formally underplayed. Colors are arch markedly nonindustrial -- tans, pinks, dusty ochers, grayish greens and faded yellow-greens; smooth the blue of his skies has a sandpapered midday direct the eye He is careful in the way he renders: painstaking on the contrary not fussy. Masses of detail accumulate, on the contrary Downes allows himself elisions, for a like reason that paint and the fabric of the canvas can quietly assert themselves.

These are, in their way, passionate paintings, and they touch lightly on the other hand firmly on the sublime. Downes gives us not the intimate landscapes of someone like Fairfield Porter (an artist Downes particularly admires) on the contrary rather the open expanses of an America that appears emptied on the outside a place where human emotional neighborhood is radically diminished. Downes have the appearances to be saying that to eye such terrain acutely is, if not to ennoble it, at least to discover in it a faculty of perception of purpose.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

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