Ron Milewicz at George Billis

Ron Milewicz's third show at Billis, of recent paintings, included several of an industrial stretch of New York City landscape that unfolds toward the distant, crenellated skyline of Manhattan. Turning his back to the residential blocks of Queens, Milewicz centers his attention on a curving elevated train track that occupies the foreground; unfolding in planes and arcs behind it are rail yards and the anonymous buildings and warehouses of Long Island City. Though his draftsmanship is exacting, much in these views is invented.

Milewicz's palette is intense and often acidic, keyed to--though not literally descriptive of--season and time of day. Shadows stack up like bricks in Citiwide, Late Afternoon (2005), a horizontal, three-panel oil-on-linen painting less than 3 feet across; its colors range from deep blue to improbable, near hallucinatory yellows and greens. A shed roof sheltering a stretch of railway tracks is carefully described in deliberate strokes of cobalt blue, the rail casting a palpable, curving shadow. The 2-by-3-foot Citiwide, Winter (2004) is laid out in a cool blue-and-white palette. Citiwide, Morning (2005), in which Milewicz pulls back to rest on an expanse of rooftops in the foreground, is a smaller painting (1 foot high and less than 3 wide) that has considerable scale for its diminutive size; its predominately pink palette modulates to gray.

The second part of the exhibition involved the imagery of Greek mythology, its characters rendered as toys and action figures set in abstracted architectural stages, beyond which lie Milewicz's signature urban landscapes. He characterizes Icarus as a dancer on point, arrested in his fall, showered by feathers melting in the sun. In Theseus and the Minotaur (2005), the mythical hero appears with Ariadne's thread held in the manner of a builder's snap line, while the Godzilla-like Minotaur roars displeasure above the labyrinth walls. The small oil-on-wood Tribute (2005) rehearses the sacrifice of youths and maidens to the Minotaur, the dead bodies piled up in a vivid blue-and-blood-red landscape; a comparatively huge disk of moon has been lobbed up over the horizon.

The painter Graham Nickson, dean of the New York Studio School, where Milewicz studied for several years before joining the faculty (he also holds an undergraduate degree in art history from Cornell and a master's degree in architecture from Columbia), is a strong influence here. But as in his approach to mythology and urban geography, Milewicz has made of that influence something entirely his own.

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