Downtown San Diego Gallery Is Closing With L of a Show

The Dietrich Jenny Gallery’s current and final show punctuates the gallery’s two-year life span with a question mark. Ironically, the gallery is closing with a show of work by Greg Reser that situates contemporary painting at a crossroads, a crisis, maybe even a standstill.

Although a dearth of local collectors is to blame for the gallery’s demise, and not this purported crisis within art, Reser’s where-do-we-go-from-here questioning applies as much to his own mission as to the downtown art scene’s uncertain future.

Reser, a recent graduate of UC San Diego’s master of fine arts program, regards the position of the contemporary painter with good-humored despair. His paintings on paper and shaped canvases present tightly controlled arenas in which representation and abstraction spar with each other but neither gains the upper hand.

All of Reser’s works adopt an L-shaped format, with the surface of each arm shared by varied arrangements of three elements: a flat plane of vibrant color, a fragment of a 19th-Century landscape painting and a rendering of a small camping tent, usually on a light field that gradually darkens on one end. Reser gives equal time to each competing artistic vocabulary--hard-edged abstraction, luminous romanticism and a spare style of illusionism in between--as if laying out his options and choosing them all.

This egalitarianism (Reser uses the term in many of his titles) is a popular postmodern ploy, an adjunct to the notion that originality is obsolete and that, in today’s image-saturated society, all that is left for artists is to recycle past styles and images.

Reser’s work addresses this argument without succumbing to its fatal cynicism. Instead, curiosity and confusion infuse his work with intellectual vitality, ample proof that painters can still make sparks fly, even in an age of sensory overload. Reser is deft with both paint and words, and his work sustains multiple layers of meaning.

In the painting, “Right of Passed Age,” he floats three slick camping tents along the diagonal edge of a warm fall landscape. If the tent serves as a surrogate for the artist in his lone search for truth and a grasp on reality, its placement here atop a sublime landscape suggests at least a partial allegiance to traditional painting. Reser’s title implies that the age for such painting has passed, but as a punning variant on “rite of passage,” it also proposes that a solid foundation in tradition is fundamental to the growth of the contemporary artist.

Reser plays with codes of communication, both visual and verbal, and his experiments amuse while stabbing at larger questions of purpose. As in his show last summer at the gallery, Reser’s primary focus is his own unresolved focus. How long he can remain fixed on flux without it becoming a cloying affectation remains to be seen. For now, though, Reser is still quite capable of extracting the pungent and the wry from an altogether contrived crisis.

The show continues at the Dietrich Jenny Gallery (660 Ninth Ave.) through Dec. 16. Several additional paintings by the artist can be seen in the “Critic’s Choice” exhibition at Sushi (852 8th Ave.) through Jan. 13.