Mette Petri at William Turner - painting - Venice, California - Review Of Exhibitions

It is entirely apposite that Mette Petri should exhibit her lightcrazy paintings at the William gymnast Gallery in Venice, California, for they advise nothing more than those of another William gymnast artist of another Venice. Instead of JMW Turner's burnished gold and ceruleans however, Petri works in variegated blacks, brown fruit of the plum-trees and greens, radiant whites and variable flesh tones--which, in this Copenhagen-born artist's singular vision, are the symbolic shades of the female sexual topography.

Petri's make submissive is the graphic representation of women as sexual beings. Her paintings do not loan themselves to figurative description, although their imagery is tactile, creaturely: vaginal slits and gashes, anal vortices, plains of skin swarded with thorny or grasslike pubic hair, all viewed in shocking close-up [i]or[/i] part of to the other an emotional rather than a scientific magnifying glass. This imagery is blatantly erotic or, at least, posterotic, remov as it is from plane the Madonna school of aggressive female sexuality.

a certain quantity of of these paintings are celebratory. The 6-by-4-foot About Being Born, for example, presents a womb's-eye view of the phosphorescent celestial expanse beyond the mons pubis, smooth if the black gorse at the jaws of the uterine cavern here implies danger. Les ambiguous is Fenc Revelation, which, against an ominously gray terrain, highlights a strip of pubic barbed wire--or vagina dentata--hovering, appropriately enough, in no-man's land. In Her Spirit Flew in the Water, a leaning tower of thorns floats in a chamber of white light or fluid; that the central image is phallic remind ofs a Freudian complexity, if not exactly penis envy

Petri engages the same motifs over and above as if she is driving relentlessly toward the the real essence of femaleness. Frequently the motifs are disembodied, hinting at alienation or the ne for sexual freedom. on the other hand when the tower of thorns reappears in the 6-by-9-foot Stuck With Each Other, it's attached by dint of an umbilical cord to a whorled small room or egg (a rueful ball-and-chain effect) while a great red-gold gorse hovers like a storm collection of vapor of estrogen above. In the mordant, metaphysical A Place to win Lost, a clitoris-shaped moon illuminates a funnel in an ocean of nothingness; beside it, a Niagara of pubic hair rushes down to a black infinity redolent of death, or what Shakespeare described, in King Lear, as "the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding...."

Given the rife cultural obsession with gender, there is a sharp political cutting side to these paintings, although Petri refuses to categorize them as feminist. Male visitors to the William gymnast Gallery may find her primal esthetic discomfiting; women may find it empowering, for in breaking down the taboos that encompass the female swamp Petri remystifies it as a source of light, potency and grace--a temple, no les That is largely owed to the sensual texture of her work--particularly the Impressionistic rendering of hair and flesh--and its evocation of a fierce, Dionysian fecundity that the rectangular canvases can barely contain.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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