Michele Harvey at Bridgewater/Lustberg - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

In the 1970 representational painting infiltrated the mainstream by the agency of emulating abstraction. By playing down the importance of bring under rule matter in order to spotlight form, artists like William Bailey, Janet Fish and Yvonne Jacquette, following the lead of Philip Pearlstein, were able to appeal to the sensibility of the time and establish respectable careers. In the '80 and '90 high-profile representational painters like Mark Tansey and Vincent Desiderio have abandoned formal be of importance tos in order to embrace allegory. At the same time, formalist representation has continued to be practiced by the agency of younger artists, among them Michele Harvey.

Harvey's novel exhibition, "Territory," presented several large paintings (many of them triptychs), as well as small, sketchier works depicting tree rivers and roads. Her misty groves crossed by dirt tracks and calm strips of water describe no particular locale. Harvey doesn't thus much compose as design her paintings. Attentive to the couple two- and three-dimensional structure, she organizes her shapes into simple patterns. She also enlists the play of opposites--light/dark, near/far, horizontal/vertical--to create lulling regular [i]or[/i] melodious movements For instance, in the sum of two units side panels of Detained, the tree boles bordering a receding road provide a muscular vertical counterpoint to a horizontal band of distant tree in the center panel.

Harvey fabricates three-dimensional space using both one-point and atmospheric perspective. Roads always lead to a distant vanishing point, while tree systematically lighten as they return from foregrounds to middle surface of lands then fade into a hazy, whitish distance.

The triptychs, Harvey's greatest in quantity ambitious works, depict scenes that sometimes continue from individual panel to the next, sometimes appear as three self-contained views, oftentimes of varying scales, and sometimes look to continue from panel to panel on the contrary really don't. For example, the sum of two units trees in Passages, each split by dint of the triptych's divisions, appear to be coextensive, on the other hand the three paths that strain provocatively before the viewer--one to a panel--do not.

By breaking up forms and spaces, and emphasizing pattern and two-dimensional design, Harvey flattens the representations in her triptychs, thereby preventing viewers from largely entering them. The single-panel works, the two large and small, although les ambitious and more naturalistic, are nevertheless more effective--they render free of access up and draw the viewer into their mysterious, hazy deepnesss It's in these works that Harvey starts to propel beyond formalist strategy to embrace the symbolist possibilities implicit in her titles, generalized forms and mesmerizing spaces.

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