“The Blue Boat," one of the large canvases seen in John Wallace's recent solo exhibition at Blue Mountain Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, in Chelsea, depicts a group of nude men and ^-women sitting in a rudimentary boat that resembles a communal coffin. One of the men strums a guitar, while another, standing half hidden behind a tree on the shore reaches through the bare limbs toward a woman sitting beside the guitar player in the boat. Meanwhile, a man seated on the opposite end of the boat reaches down to caress the bare bottom of a woman swimming beside it, as she reaches up toward another woman leaning over a chess board within the vessel.

 While the sketchy planes and undifferentiated features of the figures suggest an effort at formal distancing, the painting still seems emotionally loaded. Far from the sunny idylls of the Impressionists, Wallace's painting suggests an allegorical meditation on how the seemingly carefree social entanglements of enlightened, liberated couples can be tainted by ambivalence, or even regret, in memory. 

It should be admitted, of course, that when it comes to painting, such specific interpretations are dubiously subjective and can often fly far afield of the artist's actual intentions. The situations in paintings, after all, are as likely to be fictional as autobiographical. Or else they can simply be plastic constructs contrived as occasions for formal exploration-either from imagination or based upon art historical precedents. For Wallace is nothing if not a consummately sophisticated painter, capable of producing effects which can, and should, be savored for their purely aesthetic qualities.

 That said, however, it is also true that Wallace, a tenured professor of painting and drawing at Western Connecticut State University, brings to visual art a narrative gift so richly novelistic that one can't help pondering the possible meanings of his compositions any more than ignore all the subtextual implications in a complex prose passage by Nabokov or Updike. Indeed, Wallace is one of our more intriguing post-modern storytellers, employing a variety of dramatic devices, from allegorical enjambments akin to Beckmann (who inspired him, as a student, to become an artist), to the fiery colors of the Fauves, to the homegrown romanticism of the American regionalists.

 Perhaps the centerpiece of the show, in terms of establishing its ruminative mood, is "Self-Portrait with Telescope, the Pleiades and Saskia." Here, the lanky artist, who has a keen interest in science and often includes its gadgetry in his compositions, is seen toting a telescope on his back and walking (curiously, in the company of a cat more canine than feline in its apparent companionableness!) under a starry sky. He has the appearance of a solitary seeker on a long trek, even as he sallies forth between a house lit by cozy yellow windows and the proverbial picket fence, in a snow-blanketed comicstrip suburb evoking Gasoline Alley.

Although not always as wryly mellow as here, the figure of the solitary artist is a recurring theme. In "Castle Hill," he seems a more tormented younger self, skulking in a landscape where windblown trees, evoked in bravura strokes, quote van Gogh. Then there is "Studio Interior," a tondo in which the painter turns away from a nude model, as though interrupted in his work by the viewer, the circular format enhancing the effect of a tunnel where he has been hiding away with his creative obsessions.

   That these obsessions make the artist a perennial outsider, even among his loved ones, is nowhere more evident than in "Approaching Storm, Creve Coeur," in which a young man stands in the shadow of a large tree at the foot of a hill, leading up to a Hopper-esque house. Midway between the man and the house, are a mother and child. In contrast to the fully clothed figure below, apart from a diaphanous white garment that floats over the woman's torso, they are idyllically nude, like figures in a classical painting.

Under a turbulent sky so red, white, and blue that it could appear to be an American flag shredded by the lightning bolts streaking through the clouds, the man appears estranged by his thoughts from his abundant domestic blessings, cut off from the exalted maternal tableau on the hill above him.

No painting in recent memory better personifies the paradox of the artist, as a figure at once entranced by and poignantly exiled from the simple pleasures of everyday reality.

 Other works partake of a broader symbolism, employing nude couples to suggest Edenic fantasies-or possibly relatively lighthearted reveries cast in an Edenic light. In "Sunset, Corn Hill Beach", the man appears to be levitating behind the frontally posed woman, the beginning of his pubis aligned with the back of her head, as a sailboat traverses the watery horizon and a pair of stylized fishes swim in fanciful symmetry, one above the other. Here, too, another of Wallace's pecu­liarly American skies, filled with luminous streaks of red, white, and blue, heightens the chromatic voltage.

However, Wallace can be equally evocative when he employs a softer, more subdued palette, as seen in another large canvas called "Roswell Crossing." While this painting of a nude man leading a nude woman on a horse harks back to aspects of Cezanne, as well as Picasso's neoclassical period, it most likely refers (at least symbolically) to a time in the late 1960s when Wallace received the Roswell Museum and Art Center's Artist-in-Residence grant and his wife, the painter Margaret Grimes, lived in. the New Mexico desert, near where the atomic bomb was tested.

In an artist statement issued in connec­tion with this most recent of numerous gallery and museum shows, John Wallace employed the intriguing term "the trace elements of civilization." One of them might be the bittersweet traces of melancholy that haunt a man of sensibility, contemplating the world we have created for ourselves. Mingled with a pervasive reverence for life and an undercurrent of healthy sensuality, it made for a most memorable exhibition.

February March 2007

-Ed McCormack

GALLERY&STUDIO 29