Jean-Pierre Roy at Rare

Perhaps as a sign of our geopolitically tense times, several exhibitions opening the fall season in New York offered scenes of postapocalyptic dystopia. One of the more successful of these was "Landmarks," Jean-Pierre Roy's solo at Rare, which included five deftly executed mid- to large-scale paintings (all from 2007) featuring dramatically lit urban landscapes in devastating states of ruin. Part Hudson-River-School realism, part Hollywood-disaster-movie tableau, these seductive works--at once cataclysmic and serene--hum with tension.

Futuristic themes have long appealed to artists seeking carte blanche to express their imaginative musings. Roy's works are not painted after real spaces or from photographs; rather, they emanate solely from the artist's comprehensive understanding of optics, perspective and the physics of light. This approach produces scenes that appear simultaneously real and unreal, making them subtly discomfiting to look at.

All of the paintings included in the show have balanced compositions that lend them a certain gravity, and each is dominated by a limited range of mostly analogous hues. In Parade of the Blind Traveler, for example, a corporate skyscraper, its windows glowing an eerie ultramarine blue, sits smack in the middle of the painting, with rubble-strewn, slate-blue avenues flanking it on both sides. Plumes of smoke and crumbling red-violet lit buildings provide a theatrical backdrop. The dark city in the nearly 7-by-15-foot Dream of Parted Steel has suffered a worse fate. Piles of debris are heaped on either side of a chasm worthy of Dante, while the few structures that remain standing burn in a fiery orange that sharply contrasts with the immense blue-green clouds of smoke churning ominously behind them. The Defeat of Anthropy has a quieter power. Here, lush foliage turned golden green in the hazy, late-afternoon light surrounds a towering, long-abandoned apartment building at the center of the composition. The building's facade has been brutally shorn off, revealing tree roots clinging to its demolished cement-gray floors; leafy branches emerge from its empty windows.

With the exception of Passage to the Prairie, in which airborne jetliners careen into a menacing inferno, the paintings are devoid of any sign of a living human presence. Speaking to our anxiety about the fragility of societal stability and control, Roy's landmarks--unlike those built to mark our progress--portend a torturous, albeit beautiful, path through time and space.

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