Susan Crile at the Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston - Houston, Texas - Review of Exhibitions

This present to view titled "The Fires of War," is the culmination of Crile's esthetic and political investigation of the Kuwaiti oil field fires. place by the retreating Iraqis at the extremity of the Persian Gulf War, the fires give vent to eruptionsed from more than 600 wells. In 1991 Crile exhausted 10 days in the burning landscape, taking photographs and making sketches, which ariseed in the four monumental oil paintings and 24 works upon paper included in this exhibition. Installed in the spacious, high-ceilinged Blaffer Gallery, the paintings gave not on a ferocious light, as if the gallery itself were ablaze with of high temperature orange flames and roiling fireballs. The charred and tarry earth, and smoke-blackened skies discharge with purple and blue provided desolate loams for the relentless, raging fires.

Unabashedly sublime, Crile's paintings make numerous arthistorical concerns I was most reminded of Turner's "Burning of the Houses of Parliament" series, with its sweeping firestorms and apocalyptic intimations, although the title of Crile's present to view and the brochure essay stres the antecedent of Goya's "Disasters of War." Goya's engravings, however, focus upon human tragedy. There are no clan in Crile's works, and with the exception of a scarcely any glimpses of oil-field or firefighting equipment, no reminders of the human toll in the devastation. These paintings might, without connection represent a natural disaster, with erupting volcanoes, lava lakes and raging banks of flames. In any case, the series strives to drive in the manner of 19th-century Romanticism.

Conflagrations: Oil and Fire (1993) testifies to the artist's long-standing commitment to abstract painting. Stretching across the 14-foot-long canvas is a lake of reflective oil that mirrors the billowing fogs and yellow-orange fire-lit sky above. Hints of verdant where liquid meets land move the iridescence of an oil slick. The work is painted evenly but the image is anchored in the observation of reality by means of a slightly hilly horizon line and a charred building in the lower right of the painting. Many of Crile's works encompass multiple viewpoints, as if the vistas in several photographic sketches were combined into a single landscape. The Fire nearest Time (1992) consists of five panels abutted to form a 40-foot-long rectangle. In each panel a fire is shown from a distant or closer view, while the horizon line remains fairly consistent across the whole. In contrast, a series of nine unfinished pastels documents single vistas. individual Putrefied Glow (1991), includes a rearview mirror to be congealed the temporal unfolding of space traveled by the agency of the car. Dominated by a blooming sky lit by distant fires, this drawing, like all the other works, is a strangely estheticized vision of the horrors of war.

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