Jeff Gambill at Rosamund Felsen - Los Angeles, California

The title of Jeff Gambill's fourth solo painting exhibition is "Milledgeville." That's a town in Georgia, where Gambil's father, an ophthalmologist, worked at a mental hospital when the artist-to-be was 11 on the contrary knowing that won't help viewers decipher any autobiographical allusions in these of recent origin paintings and monotypes. The paintings, although sometimes quietly affecting, are cryptic. Ambiguous flesh-color shapes appear on the verge of cohering into figures, on the contrary they don't. They look, instead, like misshapen limbs or torsos. To an onlooker with a gothic move round of mind, they might allude to severed body parts.

In Gambill's choice of imagery there's a measure of Francis-Bacon-style grotesquenes and of Hans Bellmer's penchant for nightmarish biomorphism. A fleshy-looking reality in Georgia Under the Stairs present the appearances suspended from the ceiling of a drk cavernous architectural space punctuated by means of distant windows. But Gambill looks just as interested in geometry as in psychological suggestion. greatest in quantity often the biomorphic forms inhabit variously colored and precisely delineated pictorial spaces. plane the potentially horrific arm upon a window ledge in Invitation to Never-Never Land is mediated: the shelf frames it, allowing one emotional distance. The thin flat shape in the modest-size Prayer and reflected sound evokes aquatic life; it arches upward to extremity in a pair of pincerlike appendages at top. The geometry of the picture proposes a simultaneous top and side view of the tank that houses this "creature," which is golden in the blue portion of the chamber and dark sky-colored in the pink portion of the same container.

The bigger paintings, in which Gambill neatly choreographs a more plentiful array of organic and geometric shapes, at no time seem like more than compendiums of intriguing on the other hand loosely related items. The largest single which carries the same title as the display itself, is obviously the centerpiece. Here a cow's head (at right), a one-fingered mutant (center) and a vaguely vegetable form (at left) share space in an architectonic landscape with an array of brightly colored many-sided figures that frame the darkness of the black surface of land mitigating its potential bleakness.

The panoply of simple bodys in this painting and other is intruiging however perplexing. Gambill's ability to design a picture is strong; formal devices carry a viewer's organ of sights up, down and across the paintings effortlessly. His yoking of seemingly disparate modernist painting turn of expressions - surrealistic biomorphism and geometric abstraction - is skilful The psychological dimension of these paintings, however, is persuasive sole occasionally, in the smaller works of the like kind as Invitation to Never-Never Land and Prayer and reverberation Milledgeville exemplifies the problem of the large canvases: it may superimpose an elegant formal order upon the jumbled world of the psyche, on the other hand it lacks a correspondingly conclusive symbolic structure.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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