April Gornik at Danese

Cloud-scudded sweeps of sky billowed up and blanketed the contemplative, occasionally forbidding terrain of April Gornik's recent collection of idealized, small paintings, the product of quiet observation. Caught in a meticulous interplay of modulated light and darkness, Gornik's compositions are pure artifice, seamless surfaces of oil on linen that intentionally recall the sublime luminosity of John Frederick Kensett, Frederic Church and Martin Johnson Heade, as well as the lonely scapes of Caspar David Friedrich. In the tradition of such artists, some of them naturalists or students of meteorology, Gornik proposes a veracity that has to do with the experience of landscape. These 10 paintings (one dated 2000, the others 2001) offered a satisfying foil to the more illusory embrace of the spirit of place in six large-scale charcoal drawings devoted to a related investigation of dark against light.

Solitary as a sentinel, a massive rock island evoking Friedrich juts out of the still water of its own reflection in Blue Light, a 25-by-22-inch oil on linen. Undisturbed beneath an ominous sky, an unbroken horizon stretches along the far distance. Storm clouds roil the covering sky. Gornik multiplies the rock formation to varying psychological effect with a chain of inhospitable islands scattered like a series of cairns across the retreating volcanic seascape of Halang Bay, a rendering of the celebrated rocks in the sea waters of Vietnam. Showing more attention to clouds and sky, this new painting is closely related to her previous Halang Bay Imagined (2000), not included in this show. In the Appalachian ridge of Suspended Night and the encircled bay of Suspended Light, Gornik seems to clock the minutes before dusk in the glow of sunset cast through cumulus.

A calming, atmospheric light barely inflected by clouding is a product of the contrast between the paper of Gornik's large-scale drawings and the dense charcoal forestry that figures them. Each drawing seems to reflect a readily identifiable encounter, in part the effect of the familiarity of her choice of landscape passages. Sometimes the locations are recognizably compelling, as in Old Roman Light, where the vertical thrust of trees recalls the countryside along the Appian Way set against a humid sky. In Flooded Trees, a vertical band of illumination pours down a corridor composed of trees and their reflection in a waterway that bisects the drawing, leading the eye into an uncertain distance. In the typically backlit Light through a Forest and Edge of the Forest, trees and their shadows, rather than their reflections, lead into the distance of a perpetual afternoon.

The truth of these satisfying canvases and drawings lies in their believability as representations, not in their verisimilitude, as Gornik intends. She once said of the Luminists, "Depicting the way the world actually looked was not nearly as important as conveying the sensation, the spiritual essence of the landscape," and the same could be said of her.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group