Martha Mayer Erlebacher at Fischbach - painting exhibition; New York, New York

Erlebacher has been known for at least sum of two units decades now as a figurative painter who has based her life's work upon the classics - on Renaissance painting as well as the sterner traditionalism of Poussin and Ingres. Canvases in this latest exhibit displayed no less technical skill in the limning of the male and female bare figure than Erlebacher has shown in the past, on the contrary the allegorical import of the work was perhaps a bit more thicket more subtle and in ne of a certain amount of "literary" interpretation.

For instance, Three Women at Dusk is, according to the artist, about death. Three in a state of natures sit on a satin-draped bench below a looming tree. The single to the left points outward, the individual at center is almost manly in her hand-draped-over-the-knee light musculature. The single to the right nearly disappears beneath the twilight of arboreal shadows - woman returning to her primal origins, to a reintegration with nature.

If that interpretation chills your inner man a bit, as it does mine, a more lyrical version of the thanatoid theme is to be set in Garden Purgatory, with its respects to both the Garden of Eden and the Roman Catholic conception of an expiatory state after death. The garden is an almost hallucinatorily classical site, containing multiple statues of female [i]in puris naturalibus[/i]s - a kind of hellenic chorus bidding farewell to the central character, a half-in-shadow female bare holding a flowing beige satin "shroud" to the top of her head. A more to the full fleshed-out and classically ample hand-maiden stands, back to us, holding a mirror to the dying one's inscrutable face.

Erlebacher's greatest in quantity uplifting canvas featured both A Man and a Woman. As usual, they were pictured in gloomy natural surroundings - in this case, reject for the tree trunk and branch they stand before, all black. The woman has individual hand on a leafy branch. The shadow of those leaves implying nature's grasp over woman - dapples her with what single might take to be doom-portending half-lights. The man's finely muscled material part is arched as if in consideration of flight. His neck head and left arm strain toward the heavens a region which, Erlebacher have the appearances to suggest, is man's alone.

The artist's technique, her antiseptically sexy way with the stark naked figure, and even her classical inspirations are not to be faulted. on the other hand it strikes me that the relationships she draws between woman and man, woman and nature, and woman and death, have uncomfortably sexist overtones.

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