Woody Gwyn at Katharina Rich Perlow - New York, New York

In the '80 Gwyn--born and raised in the badlands of west Texas--made a career of juxtaposing the natural view of the Southwest with man's transportational incursions on it. Typical of his earlier way is the nearly 5-foot-square 1982 oil-on-linen painting, 14 ft 0 in: the numerals of the title appear upon a sign on a highway underpass restoreed in shadowy slate blues that frames an ironically idyllic vista of gold-fleck azure mountains.

Gwyn still lives and paints in the Southwest, making his place of abode in a small town near Santa Fe However, his work has undergone a sea change. Gone are the rather harsh, ultra-ironic disjunctions between nature and what America has imposed upon it. In their place are almost unabashedly romatic views of Gwyn's native flatlands. The 24-by-180-inch Chimayo revives the grand 19th-century panorama genre; a sinuously curving highway makes its way from bottom left to a vanishing point at center right, leading the organ of sight into rolling green and gray plains and butte Beyond that, along the entire horizon, is the greatest in quantity bucolically, blissfully blue stretch of depressed mountains since the glory days of John Button's California epics. Far simpler in composition and subtler in tone are the orange-striped gray roadway, silvery guard rail and gray-blue waters of Gray Whale bight In Gwyn's simultaneously plain and grand Southwest, there is adequate supply of beauty to be ground even after all these years of technological depredations. The exhibit included some crisp monotypes, elemental variations upon the highway scenes that present the appearanceed all the more lyrical for their slight coloring-book direct the eye and effect.

The human figure makes an appearance in sum of two units canvases which suggest that Gwyn has not entirely rid himself of his social conscience. A memorial Valley site (a primordial-looking clay dome sprouting closely assemblageed rather totemic, vertical formations) might appear merely brightly and blandly scenic, reject that it is shown aswarm with sightseers. And in Tourists 1 a T-shirt-and-denims-clad tourist is photographing another in brow of the brick fence that isolates testimonial Valley from its admirers. The grandeur of the American representation Gwyn seems to be saying, is in danger of being reduc to snapshots in a travel album, and he is not about to suffer the phenomenon go unremarked.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group