Ray Smith at Ramis Barquet - New York - painting exhibition

Art in America, Jan, 2003 by Edward Leffingwell

Signaling a departure from his brand of magic realism, associated with his bicultural, Tex-Mex heritage, Ray Smith assembled an exhibition of computer-based works that revealed little connection to the figurative, often surreal paintings for which he is best known. Smith's new work includes mural-scale painting, studies in the form of digitally manipulated photographs printed as photolithographs, and digitally compounded C-prints that relentlessly repeat images of consumer culture and instruments of mass destruction, as though remarking the impending loss of the American dream.

At an imposing 9 feet high and nearly three times as long, the 12-panel oil-on-wood marine painting Regatta (2002) demonstrates the extent of Smith's painterly ambitions with a hallucinatory double rendering of an American aircraft carrier at sea. There is something both ominous and playful about the painting, which depicts a massive vessel, digitally mirrored and set on a course leading to collision with itself. The ship's shining, golden anchors ornament her gleaming bow like emblems of rank, and the squared terminus of the flight deck emphasizes the ship's function as a floating parking lot. The four closely related photolithos on Japanese paper that make up a portfolio called Ships (2002) reveal the extent of digital experimentation that led Smith through the preparatory studies for Regatta. In one image, the doubled carrier is joined at the stern as a jet launches from the flight deck into an oddly symmetrical sky. Two additional portfolios of photolithos, Houses (vertical) and Houses (horizontal), both 2002, rank topological examples of the American frame house of the early 20th century. They appear to be abandoned, fading images of a homeland in real need of security.

Most successful are Smith's three digital C-prints. Bright and crisp, they recall the cinematic prancing of Busby Berkeley and the monogrammed repeats of Louis Vuitton. At roughly 5 by 4 feet, Gun Ship (2002) doubles and redoubles the image of a ship as it launches missiles that blaze in sulfurous explosions of light and smoke. The multiplied ships appear to meet at the center of the image, where they are digitally bound together in the form of an X, an abstracted replication of a mechanical Narcissus wrapped up in the energy of its own gaze. The simplicity of U-2 (2002), which is nearly 10 feet in length, derives from its essential image, an example of the famous surveillance and reconnaissance plane reduced to an endless grid of multiple Xs, tilted in the brilliant blue endlessness of the sky. Insistently horizontal at nearly 8 feet wide, the manipulated choreography of Legs (2000) offers a kaleidoscopic repeat of red sandals and red-cuffed hands, mosaics of tawny flesh and black costumes bordered with rows of artificial daisies. Like the other digitally manipulated images in this exhibition, it seems an exercise in sexual calisthenics, practiced by cheerleaders relentlessly enthusiastic for digitized lives in time of war.