ART REVIEW : Fusing Hi-Tech and Surrealism

In Jeff Gambill’s beautifully crafted paintings, the space of the computer screen meets the memory of Surrealism. The smooth fusion mutates into an imaginary world of animated weightlessness. Here, meaty, organ-like forms float against abstract landscapes--flat fields of synthetic colors, neat symbols and 3-D grids. These landscapes don’t describe the world outside; they map the interface between consciousness and technology.

Gambill’s mural-scale, oils-on-canvas at Rosamund Felsen Gallery combine surgical precision with dreamy speechlessness. Their masterfully rendered surfaces constitute a high-tech, cybernetic stew that doesn’t forget the pleasures of the flesh or fail to remember the sophisticated techniques of pre-Modern painters.

Collectively titled “Milledgeville,” the images refer to a town in Georgia where his father was in residency at a hospital for the insane. Without being explicitly autobiographical, Gambill’s images occupy the hallucinatory space between exact reference and unspecifiable association.

They haunt because they pit the desire for clarity against the knowledge that rationality is inadequate. The lumpy fragments recall aspects of collage, but the unified spaces supersede this suggestion.

Echoes of Francis Bacon resonate, but by restraining Bacon’s excesses, Gambill’s paintings border on a bemused intrigue. As if his fleshy fragments were not parts of absent bodies but autonomous organisms unto themselves, they cavort in a realm that is simultaneously benign and unsettling.

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 8525 Santa Monica Blvd., (310) 652-9172. Closes today.