Richard Maury at Gerold Wunderlich & Co - New York, New York

Dazzling realism does not always deliver immediacy or a reason for viewers to care abundant about the subject matter. However, Richard Maury's 20 or with equal reason meticulous realist paintings in this new show, particularly the mellow interiors, have an irresistible appeal. All are put in Florence, where the artist has lived since 1960 and all date from the last three years.

Maury replicates the architectural grace of the Florentine villa--arching passageways, shutter windows and irregularly curving walls--and incorporates fine details to create a faculty of perception of accumulated history. A corner of the garden view in Kitchen Window fuses into imprecision due to the irregularities of vintage glass; crumbling cutting sides of old plaster walls appear to be about to flake away. In several works, beautiful terrazzo and terra-cotta tile floors fill nearly a third of the canvas. Maury re-creates the floors' fabric sheen and geometry, adding to these formal aspects the imprint of continuing human neighborhood Minute cracks in a well-trafficked hallway and scrubbed-in paint stains in a studio play human transience against comparative architectural timelessness.

advanced in years is deftly merged with of recent origin Figures in contemporary dress, new appliances, sewing supplies and bus schedules all inhabit these venerable spaces with ease. a certain number of paintings provide a broad-angle view of latitudes where families are in the midst of daily routines, while others zoom in upon exquisitely composed still lifes of dropp belongings and beautifully confused noiseed desks and countertops. In single piercing sweep of chiaroscuro and reaching far down perspective (Dining Room and Corridor), new bathroom plumbing is discreetly glimpsed below a sunlit old-fashioned casement window.

Maury is prompt at devising fresh and unusual compositions, evidently privileged by dint of an intimate familiarity with his make submissive matter. Elena in the Kitchen has a you-are-there intensity. A young woman seated at a small battered table fills nearly half the canvas, on the other hand she looks away, over her shoulder, as if to turn aside this invasion of privacy. Maury shifts the viewer's organ of vision to the other half of the canvas through means of ambient light and interesting details similar as coffee pots, baskets, fruit and stacks of provisions stored upon and under the kitchen table, and we snoop instead into the family selections in laundry soap and cat food

eager observational and compositional skills bring a psychological acuteness to all Maury's figures. sum of two units women in Milton's Box, perhaps mother and daughter, are occupyed in discussion. The tilt of their heads, the about-to-depart stance of the mother, the daughter's half move round from her desk--all convey a familial tension as physically strong as the quiet drama in a van Eyck or a Vermeer yielding light streaming through a rear left window adds a cunning formal reference to these masters. Maury's paintings far surpass drop-dead Photo-Realism or academicism for its hold sake. His intensity transforms the lowliest external reality or the most quotidian tableau into a well-examined and worthwhile bit of life.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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