Richard Bosman at Elizabeth Harris - New York

Many of the 11 paintings in Richard Bosman's first solo show in New York since 1994 featured the woods, lakes and streams of the Adirondacks, occupied by canoes, swimmers or deer. Four wood-paneled interiors depict trophies from the outdoor life. such as deer heads and snowshoes. Compared to Bosman's previous treatments of water and swimmers, which often portray overwhelming waves and clinging survivors, these canvases seem less neo-Romantic, though still not quite specific enough to be Realist. The recent works interpret landscape and related motifs from the plein-air realist painting tradition in the way that some of his paintings of the 1980s reinterpret a figurative tradition from Japanese comics. Where those earlier works limned violence, the works since 2001 are notable for their renunciative, Spartan rigor.

Bosman's style is often called Neo-Expressionist, since it is broadly brushed. But like several Neo-Expressionists (and like Alex Katz), he represents traditionally emotional icons with deadpan Pop simplicity, rather than creating stridently expressive abstract form. Bosman's frontal, centered compositional esthetic could have come from an old Kodak Brownie handbook. His brushed gestures mimic the fluid loopiness of scribbling, but the contours of important objects are left crisp and straight. His palette, like an L.L. Bean catalogue, is dominated by hunter green, brown, tan and light blue, with an occasional pure red or yellow accent. The cold light seems overcast and non-specific; highlights are simply whitened. What saves the artist's form from complete indifference is high contrast. Pure whites are often juxtaposed with dark bottle greens. Wood grain and parquetry are abbreviated using forceful umber lines. In Great Camp (2002), the animal-head trophies have defined shadows behind them on the wall, as if lit with a bare bulb. However, he undercuts any specific sense of light by emphatically outlining the individual stones of the fireplace.

Other painters' interests in atmosphere and fugitive color begin to seem luxurious; what matters here is brute thingness. All the compositions butt steeply receding floor or ground planes against starkly frontal wall planes or masses of foliage. This staginess recalls Neo-Classical Cubism--say late Derain--more than Katz. Intimations of narrative reinforce this effect. For example, in Lean-to (2002), one infers campers in sleeping bags on a rocky ground from two brightly lit lumpy masses. The roof of their rough-cut shelter seems half collapsed, their surroundings hacked into disarray, but no matter. They survive their return to Nature, bracingly.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group