David Bowes at Sperone Westwater - New York, New York

David Bowes's fresh paintings at first seem a bewildering cacophony of antique phraseologys and absurd images. The make submissive matter is a mix of improbable cityscapes, stock theater characters and genre sights Bowes's formal references range from Sung Dynasty flower painting to Abstract Expressionism, and he have the appearances to have been influenced by means of everyone from Hokusai to Filippo De Pisis. With its florid brushwork, lively pastel colors and rococo chinoiserie, exaggerated, over-the-top quality that was enhanced through the theatricality of this installation.

At the gallery entrance, a brightly colored canvas was hung from a file of grommets along its top cutting side and painted with the words "Art Show" It gazeed like a carnival banner. A big three-panel folding defence near the door divided the gallery's largest scope into more intimate, salonlike spaces. Near the center of the expanse a 6-foot-high freestanding double-sided canvas panel titled Venetian road Scene showed, on one side, an image reminiscent of Pietro Longhi's 1751 painting The Visit. Here, a life-size female figure aligned from head to toe in a black party style of dress stands near a canal beneath a filled moon, presumably waiting for a gondola to transport her to a ball. upon the verso is painted a red-and-white striped extremity used to moor a gondola with sum of two units carnival masks lying near its base, perhaps left there by means of now-departed revelers.

Like designs for 17th- and 18th-century stage productions, Bowes's paintings are peopl with characters from the commedia dell'arte and opera buffa, locate against fanciful backdrops and sometimes combined with incongruous Oriental motifs. Castle Magic Theatre, a large painting with a background of frenzied brushstrokes, has as its center a small rectangular image that looks to be a scene from an opera. Costum Players exhibits a wildly gesticulating Pulcinello attempting to serenade a demurely passive geisha who has been distracted from her reading. If the characters portrayed here are seen as representatives of their respective nations, Italy and Japan, then the work may have an allegorical easy in mind alluding to international relations. Similarly, satellite Maid's Matinee, an image of what appears to be the marriage observance of a white male stage performer and a exotic African princess, could be a statement about interracial harmony.

More painterly and gestural than the work in Bowes's previous of recent origin York exhibition, these paintings with their looser technique add a of recent origin facet to his exhilarating synthesis of disparate art-historical periods and paintings mode of speechs While it may be hard to accept the premise of Bowes's fantasy world of whimsy and unapologetic beauty, the forcefulness of the presentation and the artist's virtuosity demand that it be taken seriously.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group