Getting Real, Looking Back

Gallery-Going

By DAVID GROSZ
November 2, 2006

Aprimary challenge for representational painting today is creating work that does not feel anachronistic. Modernism rewrote the rules of art, and if you're not careful, realistic illusionism can be dismissed as old-fashioned. Some artists are self-consciously traditionalist. But those who want to be part of the contemporary discourse have been forced to adopt various "modernizing" strategies: They may add conceptual layers to their painting, strive for photo-realism, incorporate the lessons of abstraction, or adopt poses of postmodern irony. Another strategy is to confront the past head-on by directly referencing art history. Always bold, this move can also be dangerous. The past's legacy is weighty, and it can either inspire or overwhelm an artist, as a comparison between these two exhibitions demonstrates.

For 40 years, George Deem (b. 1932) has queried artistic representation in paintings that cite past masters, from Caravaggio to Gilbert Stuart, Velázquez to Whistler, Raphael to Picasso. The artist he has pursued most doggedly is Vermeer, and in his current show at Pavel Zoubok Gallery he presents 10 works that reconsider, appropriate, and otherwise play with the Dutchman's iconic compositions. The result is a series of pictorial and conceptual riffs on the history of art, perspective painting, and the enigmatic Vermeer himself that grow in richness and satisfaction the longer you contemplate them.

In "After the Concert" (2005), Mr. Deem erases the characters from Vermeer's "The Concert" so that the viewer faces a stage set without actors. He also zooms out to expose a wider frame with new details and removes the two paintings on the back wall of Vermeer's original, leaving in their stead two lonely naked nails. This playful revision alludes to the fact that "The Concert" was stolen from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. Ever since, the museum, following stipulations in Gardner's will, has been forced to display the empty frames.

The most striking work in the show, "Okay" (2006), depicts a view down a long hallway of a hospital or science facility. Track lights bisect the ceiling; well-groomed, bespectacled, lab-coatwearing science types stand at the doorways of their regularly spaced offices, as if posing for a group portrait; the textured black-and-white floor so common in Vermeer's work becomes a dull institutional checkerboard design.

The image is rendered in one-point perspective, a simple technique of almost scientific precision that any art student can master to produce competent illusionism. But Mr. Deem has filled the center of his composition, where the vanishing point would be, with a copy of Vermeer's "The Artist's Studio." The painting stands on an easel, which improbably leans forward, defying gravity as well as the carefully orchestrated overall perspective. By examining distinctions between art and science, and the significance of following and breaking rules in the creative process, Mr. Deem's quasi-appropriation traces the elusive divide between painting that is genius and painting that is merely okay.

The art of Kaye Donachie (b. 1970) also looks to the past, specifically, to two celebrated historical countercultures: 1960s hippie communes and the bohemian community of Monte Verità, an enclave in the Swiss hills above Lago Maggiore where artists, freethinkers, free lovers, and back-to-nature advocates gathered between 1900 and 1940.

"How Heavy the Days" (2006) fuses elements of both eras in a single evocative portrait. A male face — wearing an inscrutable expression and lit from the side, with shocks of tangerine and peach inflaming his bushy hair and flushing his neck, cheek, and chin — combines features of psychoanalyst Otto Gross, a maverick disciple of Freud and resident of Monte Verità, and Mark Frechette, star of the Michelangelo Antonioni film about 1960s America, "Zabriskie Point."

A series of lyrical pencil drawings portray the writer Herman Hesse (his poetry is the source of many painting titles), the artist Emmy Hennings, and the actress Daria Halprin, Frechette's "Zabriskie" co-star. Expressionist paintings feature Wandervogel, migratory bands of European youths with long unkempt hair, hippie attire, and guitars slung around their necks; others show quiet artists' studios flooded with purple moonlight.

All of these works are sensual and quite beautiful. Ms. Donachie paints with delicate, impassioned brushstrokes and has a feel for emotive colors. But one senses too much safety in the familiarity of her style, as if she fears that leaping into the unconscious and unrepressed realms that her paintings purport to celebrate would risk the creation of something "ugly."

While Mr. Deem's work simultaneously exposes Vermeer's proto-modernism and carves a unique space for his own idiosyncratic contemporary vision, Ms. Donachie's seems trapped in an illusory past. The sought-after paradise of historical bohemianism, with its promise of uncomplicated creative freedom, is too obviously mediated by books, photographs, and movies. Her romanticism can feel affected and her nostalgia invented; there is little sense that real life experience informs the work.

Ms. Donachie's forays into the past yield only beautiful ghosts — haunted, elegant visions that, if questioned closely, vanish into thin air.

Deem until November 11 (533 W. 23rd St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-675-7490);

Donachie until November 22 (627 W. 27th St., between Eleventh and Twelfth avenues, 212-337-9563).