SANTA MONICA

Unlike most Photo-Realist painters, Shirley Pettibone has always been more concerned with the conceptual gap between the captured image and the artist’s imagination than with specific insights into mechanical reproduction and the language of representation. Her deliberately rendered depictions of water surfaces, with their subtle interplay of colors and reflections, utilize the camera less as an objective tool than as a formal catalyst for her own subjective explorations of color, surface and abstraction.

Pettibone continues these painterly investigations in two new series of watercolors, sharply contrasting flowers in their natural habitat with ice floes and glaciers captured during a trip to Alaska. In both series, Pettibone floods her subjects with light and improbable color in order to draw attention away from “realism” and focus more specifically on the independence of the brush stroke within a network of marks and gestures. Instead of using watercolor as a limpid wash, Pettibone accentuates edge and microscopic color contrasts, breaking down her subjects into abstract forms and geometries much like a cross between scientific pointillism and the flat frontality of Jasper Johns.

In many ways, however, the work’s chief interest lies in its process rather than any new insights into pictorial language. By accentuating surface pattern and decoration Pettibone tends to belie the toughness and rigorous nature of the work’s execution. We come away with a feeling that natural phenomena have been “tamed” for painterly accessibility rather than shaped into an aesthetic that questions the rhetoric of both paintbrush and camera lens. (Tortue Gallery, 2917 Santa Monica Blvd., to May 17.)