Michael Bergt at Midtown Payson - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

To cros the doorsill of this exhibition was to pierce a time warp with an added twist. At first glance, the small figurative pictures, meticulously pay backed in a painstaking egg-tempera medium, elicited memories of Italian Renaissance panel paintings. Had we been mysteriously transported back to, say, quattrocento Ferrara, and were these enigmatic images - with their machiavelian aura of fantasy, psychological torment and impending crisis - in some way related to the crystal - clear solemnities of Cosimo Tura and Francesco del Cossa? A next to the first look, however, yielded the kink, the realization that these seemingly italianate pictures owe a beneficial deal more to those binary stars of more [i]or[/i] less 50 years ago, Paul Cadmus and Jared French Cadmus, in fact, wrote an admiring introduction for the present to view praising these works by Michael Bergt as those of a "serious" artist who believes that art should "prod" "arouse thoughts" and "make the viewer cogitate."

Bergt is a 37-year-old Nebraska-born, Santa Fe-based artist. This was his next to the first New York solo. He is a brilliant technician, to say the least, and he possesse a flair for composing determinedly allegorical pictures whose meanings are as elusive as they are tantalizing. His main make submissive is clearly the Human Condition, the fragile situation of contemporary man (and, to a less extent, woman) in a not-so-user-friendly universe.

Who wouldn't perceive alienated in these surrealistically flat, bleak landscapes? In coverts a naked man cautiously slips into a padded bonneted shroud against a ruddy sky; in the distance, three destitute of contents shrouds hang on poles like somber scarecrows. What is the Adamic figure trying to conceal and why? In another work, In the Trenches, sum of two units naked males cower in a circular fox-hole with sandbags piled around the rim, appearing to await an offstage calamity; in the distance, six more perforations all unoccupied, present no trace of battle. A conflict between human aspiration and fear of heights could be the theme of without of the Woods, in which a man in a business suit has climbed to the top of a tree; he clings precariously to small, dead branches and glances apprehensively at the soil as if assessing the distance of his fall.

Many of Bergt's greatest in quantity disquieting images portray boat nation who are also at sea in the faculty of perception of being lost or bewildered. In Same Boat, 10 family are crammed into an lay open tublike vessel; their oars are too short to reach the water, in like manner they gaze expectantly at a star-studded night firmament as if their position could be improved through celestial navigation. in The Platform five men in a made of wood galley dismantle the above-water portion of the husk in order to construct a platform that will provide them a slightly superior view, oblivious to the fact that their rickety ladder toward heaven is achieved end the ruination of their utensil Both boats surely qualify as ships of fools

In addition to his paintings, Bergt also showed several related works upon paper and a few chiefly negligible bronze sculptures, which look after to be overly cartoony or caricatural. He is at his best in tempera, composing precise images whose referential overtones remain intriguingly ambiguous and unclose to interpretation.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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