Medrie MacPhee at Baldacci Daverio - exhibition of paintings; New York, New York

In certain ways, the new paintings by Medrie MacPhee are dramatically different from those she exhibited in her three previous fresh York solo shows. In earlier works MacPhee, a Canadian-born novel Yorker, focused on the industrial wasteland: God-forsaken factories, bridges, piers and other conformations These she depicted in a painterly phraseology that evoked Hopper-like melancholy and de Chiricoesque mystery.

In her fresh paintings, MacPhee has turned away from specific description and toward an allusive mix of abstraction and representation. These voluptuously painted, mainly medium-size pictures suggest illuminated on the contrary murky submarine places; in them, what appears a species of aquatic plant life fills the space with vertically rising tendrils and oval capsule or leaf forms. Different as it is, however, the novel work is not unrelated to the elderly In some of the industrial pictures, a weird, watery atmosphere and fantastically elaborated ductwork and plumbing prefigure the novel paintings' oceanic ambience and vegetation. And MacPhee's involvement in light, illusory space, dreamy dispositions and the sensuous physicality of paint is as powerful as ever.

Several of the new paintings create the illusion of looking [i]or[/i] part of to the other a kind of underwater forest that is illuminated from beyond by the agency of diffused sunlight. The Music of Spheres is typical: in the foreground, thin, elongated main stocks punctuated by disks like lily-pads stretch out in irregular parallels from the bottom to the top of the canvas. These are silhouetted against the back- loam light, and bright highlights at the cutting sides give them a tubular dimensionality. Further back, these forms fade and become flattened into of the soul gray and purple lines and blotches. In the far distance, things dissolve into a dusky haze tinted with gold-colored orange and red. There is a step of impressionistic naturalism about this, on the contrary what is more strongly shoot forwarded is an otherworldly numinous quality.

In several other paintings, the dominant background color is sky-colored rather than yellow, making for a cooler and somewhat more mysterious submarine feeling. In sum of two units canvases another figure is added to the plant forms: a large shell-like object shaped a bit like a tire. It could be more [i]or[/i] less kind of strange mollusk, legume or carved stone. In Timpano, three of these unidentifiable forms are floating behind the foreground defence of vines.

Les lucky are a couple of paintings in which the viney plants are replaced by means of flattened ribbonlike forms dangling from pulley In Arythmia, these are located in a schematically defined architectural space, which advises they are derived from a factory setting. There's a literalism about the belt-and-pulley imagery that makes the paintings les magically evocative than the plant and shell pictures. In MacPhee's best paintings, it is the combination of imaginal vision, formal complexity and luxurious painterly sensuality that makes them work in the way that well.

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