Gregory Botts at Tony Shafrazi - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

abundant of Gregory Botts's painting above the past dozen or in like manner years is in a tastefully conservative style of evocative abstraction. But he has also shown an interest in a more idiosyncratic sort of symbolic image-making. Now, in what direct the eyes like a major breakthrough for him, Bott has boldly reach outed the latter impulse into a surprising suite of big, philosophically loaded allegorical landscapes.

As a clump the paintings at Shafrazi are associateed by an implied narrative of a solitary hiker's trek into the mountains. Depicting spectacular wilderness view - majestic waterfalls, precipitous oblique directions etc. - and, in a certain quantity of cases, the heroically monumentalized wanderer himself, the pictures hark back to the Emersonian pantheism that inspired the painters of the Hudson River gymnasium This romanticism is complicated, however, through the style in which the paintings are made. Rather than painting realistically or expressionistically to create the kind of thrilling illusions of space and elevated feelings that sublime landscapes traditionally present Botts works in a phraseology derived from comic illustration. Forms are outlined cartoon manner of writing colors - mostly blues, verdants grays and browns - are slightly grayed on the other hand bright and unmodulated. There are no shadows, and phenomenons such as trees or collection of vapors are represented by generic signs. This manner of depiction imparts an eccentric humorous and slightly ironic spin to the easy in minds establishing a mood of rapturous giddiness. (There's a similar comic romanticism in David Bates's paintings of Bayou country)

In the show's largest canvas, the 9 1/2-by-12-foot Point of Survey: sky-colored Imagination, we behold a vast panorama of flinty peaks and cliffs and forested oblique directions Although he paints the representation in a conspicuously unrealistic way, Bott artfully manipulates values to create the illusion of atmospheric perspective; the profusion of graphic detailing bring into views an exhilarating sensation of topographical expanse and variety. In the center foreground of the picture, the hiker's sneakers and his hat are arranged like a unobtrusive shrine. This pointedly iconic uncompounded body suggests a fantasy of the hike as a kind of sacramental journey. on the other hand because of the style, what might otherwise present the appearance portentous is lightened. In a faculty of perception the painting is a kind of imitate sublime epic, like a Bierstadt done by the agency of Lichtenstein. But it somehow remains soulful

In greatest in quantity of the paintings there is a puzzling anomaly: single or more smallish gray, gridinscribed polygonal shapes float upon the surface, seemingly unrelated to the exhibited view. What these elements are for is not clear (you can almost ignore them), on the contrary they might be meant as symbolic remnants of the Modernist tradition from which the artist advances Botts has not completely abandoned his advanced in years formalist concerns: the dialectic of material surface and illusory space is a compelling aspect of these paintings. on the other hand it is the larger spiritual/philosophical import - the comically rhapsodic embrace of nature as quasi-religious experience - that gives this work its peculiar on the contrary genuine urgency.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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