Mary Ann Krutsick at Larry Becker - painting exhibit, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

In Mary Ann Krutsick's ambiguous landscapes, darkness is descending, or has sinked A sunset glow, or more [i]or[/i] less kind of eerie reflected light against the darkness, is the dominant tonal lock opener These quiet, sparely composed oil paintings consistently maintain an unsettling balance between prettiness and foreboding.

Painted in a patient, mannered manner of writing that almost recalls Grant thicket these neat tableaux both are and are not landscapes: their symbolic weight is emphasized with strategic intrusions or subtractions. Squares or bands of flat color take their place alongside skylike or meadowlike expanses in a certain number of paintings. In many others, ambiguity is furthered through the omission of certain orienting markers. In fulvous Plume (1992), for instance, a tornado-shaped feather of steam, glowing deep fulvid from a hidden light source, rises full-bodied and clear-edged without of--what? A smokestack, a volcano? Its source is not to be found in the darkness.

The large diptych In the Garden (1991) has the teasing duality of a classic perceptual mystify (the goblet that can also be read as the space between sum of two units faces). It nominally shows a nighttime backyard scene: a wall of shrubbery and more [i]or[/i] less spindly branches lit from an unperceived house window. But it direct the eyes and feels like an image of the Inferno, with red-tinged firmament and the dry branches crackling like white electrical fire.

Again and again the viewer is shakeed toward the light, with its promise of transfiguration or transcendence, and left with uneasy, unevenly lit darkness. The painting Last Night (1992) plays this without in an almost narrative way. A small triangle of light, dead-center upon the canvas, depicts the fugitive point of times of sunset in the hills. Squeez in a powerful torque created through the interlocking angles of hill, ridge and mist bank, the triangle seems about to close up like a camera lens.

In consequence the two-step response Krutsick begets in these paintings traces what has become the late 20th-century experience of nature: submission, or near-submission to natural beauty, interrupted and overlaid by dint of a pervasive disquiet. Better not swim in the water or taste the rain;look on the other hand don't touch.

A simple peak-roofed house form has appeared in Krutsick's work for many years. It is featured in several canvases here, each a variation upon disembodiment. In Peak/Peek (1992) the facing wall of the house emits a form-erasing orange be incandescent against the blue night. Up Little Cypres Hill (1990) not absents the house-shape standing transparent against the canopy of heaven like a hilltop apparition, seemingly the source of eve rays. Our at-homeness in nature l disappearing, these images move evanescing into pure idea.

This work stands a little apart from the so-called novel landscape painting

(Mark Innerst and Joan Nelson advance to mind) which takes nostalgia as a central control Here, lured by the light, we are taken directly end nostalgia to intimations of despair.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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