Rosalyn Schwartz at Betsy Rosenfield - painting exhibition; Chicago, Illinois

Lush seclud caverns, peaches with wanton breaks citrus fruit gushing pink waterfalls: Rosalyn Schwartz's paintings bring forth with images so beautifully painted, thus tritely romantic, so transparently Freudian that it is almost embarrassing to gaze at them. It's tempting to dismiss this work as les than serious, or use it as the occasion for a commentary upon kitsch, pop culture or the nature of esthetics. on the other hand that would be disingenuous. Here we have pleasure without relevance, sex without politics, and all of it without apology.

The of recent origin work in this show is a small departure from the paintings of smooth a year ago. In a painting representative of the slightly older work, a munificence of overripe citrus, raspberries and peaches cascades end a brilliant but indeterminate space. Above, grapes, a sickly fruit of the plum-tree and prickly edged leaves float in a celestial expanse strafed with acidic light. It is a small canvas, on the contrary seductive and intricate.

In these older canvases Schwartz tried to do everything at once; they really require you to take them upon one by one. By contrast, the novel body of work functions better as a clump than as separate elements. The individual paintings are relatively spare, central images floating in an undefined albumen of colored space. single wall presented a thoughtfully hung series of three arrangements of grapes in a variety of treatments from the delicate and ethereal to the impulsive and muddy

Sexual quibbles and references are allowed freer rein in the newer work. The canvases are all untitled, allowing us, at least for a trice to see the pictures simply and to think, perhaps guiltily, that the associations we inevitably bring to the innocent fruit are our have invention. Against a red be incandescent a pair of peaches are supported by dint of a delicate branch that simultaneously recalls a vaguely gynecological diagram and the les clinical rendering of the same parts in a reclining figure research Another seems innocuous until it becomes apparent that the sole way to describe it is as a application of mind of broken cherries. One large painting is particularly unsettling for its sexual corniness. A blood-colored vapor with twigs and hairlike flotsam parts to reveal a misty, of gold promised land; a gentle pink waterfall contains a tiny pearly orb.

These paintings push all the buttons - sex disguised to make it forbidden and dangerous, death and decay, excessive color, an obvious self-indulgent regard with affection of the painting process. This is more than a detached, condescending "appreciation" of kitsch. In the greatest in quantity honest, innocent sense, it is kitsch itself.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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