VENICE

In the early ‘80s, Tom Wudl abandoned his geometric abstractions on perforated paper in favor of figurative imagery on canvas. His intent was to create, as he put it, “metaphors of the life force itself,” whereby the vitality of primal energy would be fused with that of the human body. Along with a series of smaller studies, Wudl’s latest large-scale paintings now apply this strategy to the landscape. “Veil III” consists of a vertical panorama that evolves from the night sky through the vaporous mists of a sun-bathed cityscape, surrounded by undulating hills, to the deep recesses of the ocean. This uninterrupted sweep from the macro- to the micro-universe, with its symbolic contrasts of day and night, natural and man-made environment, is typical of Wudl and his Zen approach to the cosmos.

Perhaps more significant is his metaphorical application of the painting process itself. Each work vacillates between romantic painterly gesture and the calculated, intricate detailing of an architect’s plan or illustration. Each cosmic element thus has its equivalent signature within the rhetoric of painting, so that the genre as a whole can be seen as an array of metaphorical fictions. The problem here is that Wudl presumably wants his audience to ignore and transcend the rhetoric, whereas the critic tends to see little else.

Irish painter Robert Janz deliberately plays on this dichotomy, contrasting representational and abstract metaphors in a series of vertical diptychs centered upon a rose motif. The upper image consists of a gray, monochromatic evolution of the flower from bud through full bloom, to death. This scratchy, agitated image resembles the scrambled calligraphies of Twombly. The bottom portion presents a warm, cloudy sfumato of overlaid color, evoking a parallel, abstract equivalent to the evolutionary process above. While the juxtaposition makes some pertinent points about the slipperiness of painterly language, the work’s serial repetition tends to bog them down in critical dogma. (L.A. Louver Gallery: Wudl at 77 Market St., to Feb. 7; Janz at 55 N. Venice Blvd., to Feb. 21.)