Maureen Gallace and Albert York at Nielsen

In Nielsen's upstairs gallery, which retains its 19th-century town-house detail, knots of seasoned painters murmured reverently as they moved among the small oil paintings of the reclusive Long Island artist Albert York. The broad, pitchy frames and classic motifs--flowers, landscapes, animals, figures--contributed to a momentary impression of a turn-the-century salon exhibition. York, in his 70s, depicts an idiosyncratic repertoire of genre subjects placed in landscapes; trees are inky, Ryderesque silhouettes, waters are luminous smears, moisture-laden light hangs like a caul over everything. The painter's human figures, although robustly outlined, are spectral. Bits of board, canvas or greensward peek through insubstantial flesh. His painterly treatment of cut flowers and livestock are meaty by comparison. Human relationships seem tenuous as well. In Two Reclining Women in a Landscape (ca. 1967), a pair of girls, who resemble Ash Can School types, occupy the foreground; they lie in front of a deftly. painted bush, which looks as if it had been uprooted from a Florentine landscape and replanted in a Long Island potato field. Though positioned in close proximity, the figures do not touch and display no discernible interest in each other.

Much superfluous theory could be spun around York's recondite subject matter--superannuated American Indians, a Victorian woman with a stork, a muscle man in briefs, Viewers unfamiliar with his background might mistake his slate-sized paintings for cranky allegories or stylistic pastiches by an adroit naif. York's paintings can be more aptly described as "frozen wisdom," arrived at through self-effacement and close observation. York looks long and hard at the phenomenal world around him and at artists he admires, such as Bellini, Manet, Cezanne, Sloan, Luks; then, he forgets himself, and paints.

Maureen Gallace's reductivist oil paintings of New England vernacular buildings, installed sparely in the well-lit, downstairs space, provided an airy cadence after York's show. Nuanced verdure, brick reds and tempered whites, playing against tints of calcined blues and gray-greens, broadcast beyond the paintings' modest confines. While it has been noted that Gallace's depictions of generic houses are based on Minimalism, her paintings that tend toward abstraction, such as Beach House, find a closer affinity to the humanist touch and compositional curiosity of post-Minimalist works, such as those by Mary Heilmann. Ultimately, however, Gallace's untenanted abodes stand on their own, as empty, plain and light-washed as an expectant Quaker meeting room.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group