Orsina Sforza at Janos Gat

Orsina Sforza lives and works in Rome. In this interesting and skillful show of paintings she focused on random accumulations of detritus, objects painted with a passionate regard for their innate presence as things. Four years ago, Sforza was making her way through the Roman neighborhood of Testaccio when she found a garbage dump near the Tiber. At high tide, the river's water permeated the dump and repositioned its contents, creating a varying mess that visually fascinated the artist. She went back to the dump and took photographs which became the basis of the oil paintings in this show.

The works typically single out a small cross-section of the chaos and decay. Sometimes there are recognizable items such as chains, paper or fabrics, but much else is hard to distinguish. As a result, the paintings seem to simultaneously shift back and forth between a nearly photographic treatment of reality and a finely handled abstraction.

In Cintura nera (Black Belt), 2006, for example, a black skein cuts through the center of the painting, its color and form defined by a background of what looks like crumpled green cloth. Fogli (Sheets), 2005/06, depicts several folded pieces of paper, with one bearing a few recognizable letters, although no words are legible. The shadow falling on the papers is a glacial blue and the distinctly drawn objects surrounding them are hard to identify. There is a dark-greenish-brown rock shape with the end of a pole above it in the lower right-hand corner, while in the upper-left corner is a white shape that also resists recognition.

Nascondiglio (Hiding Place), 2006, continues Sforza's litany of unidentifiable shapes: a mostly white background is divided by two green bands, one moving across the upper quarter of the canvas, another bending and twisting across its lower third. In the middle is a stripe with mostly smooth edges that vertically bisects the composition. In Canna piccola (Small Cane), 2005, a series of blue straplike forms wind about what looks like a meticulously rendered crumpled white sheet. An inchoate brown background lends even more ambiguity to the painting. Such indeterminancy is the strength of Sforza's practice, which sets forth quite boldly its mysteries.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning