ART REVIEW : Painting in the Photo Age

“The Spiritual Landscape,” takes a poetic approach to the relationship between external reality and internal meaning. Curated by Irit Krygier for Biota Gallery, this solid group show of 21 contemporary image-makers negotiates an ambitious role for painting after photography has usurped its descriptive function.

Krygier’s coherent yet amusing exhibition (which includes 17 painters and only 2 photographers) proposes that representational painting occupies the point at which fantasy and reality intersect. On this shifting terrain, the artists she has selected bring together metaphysics and objectivity, a strange commingling of personal belief and outside verification.

The most successful works in the exhibition outflank photography by meeting its challenge head on. They do not flinch from the camera’s capacity to exactly depict the world, but turn its achievements to their own peculiar ends.

Jon Swihart’s tiny landscape painting with wide white borders looks like a postcard from the imaginary place where 17th-Century Dutch still-lifes meet American Photorealism from the ‘70s. His meticulously rendered image combines the camera’s precision and accuracy with a textural lushness intrinsic to oils on canvas.

Richard Sedivy’s masterfully crafted image of a boarded-up house mysteriously floating on a varnish-encrusted floorboard similarly plays the appearance of reality against the invisible and potentially dark forces lurking beneath its surfaces.

Adam Ross’ painting extends this art’s domain from photography to video and TV. Resembling an animate machine or living screen, his abstract painting evokes associations with capillaries and coral, nerves and circuity. Flashes of fluorescent colors interrupt its overlapped and interconnected layers, which glow as if energized from behind.

Ross’ intentionally accidental configurations push painting beyond representation and pull “The Spiritual Landscape” away from its emphasis on the inner natures of its artists. His impersonal, almost mechanistic work eludes the opposition between photography and painting as it prevents the exhibition from getting lost in sentimentality and self-aggrandizement.

Biota Gallery, 8500 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (213)289-0979. Ends today.