Stanley Lewis at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey

This exhibition of 17 paintings and five large drawings is a smaller version of a retrospective that originated at American University in Washington, D.C. It focused on the past 10 years of Stanley Lewis's development, a period during which he has solidified his mastery of materials and harnessed them to his exploration of familiar environments. His subjects--sheds, trees, cars, landscapes punctuated by telephone poles and fences--have in common a certain age and utilitarian dignity. Lewis's fixation on the commonplace, however, seems motivated less by a desire to document his sociocultural milieu than by a need to pursue something more elusive.

Physically complex and impossible to capture in reproduction, Lewis's landscapes, based on direct observation, develop as sections of painted canvas or paper that are cut, pieced together and reworked. Sometimes Lewis simply readjusts the placement of things, but elsewhere this surgery seems more willful. Trained when abstract simplification was the ideal, Lewis opens up his spaces to suggest a larger order. In Cubist Landscape (early 1970s) he applies a structure of concentric rectangles to a collage of pictorial fragments, finding, like the Cubists, a source of formal invention in everyday subjects.

Increasingly, though, Lewis integrates these ruptured spaces into highly defined images; gaps between sections are painted in, and layers fused by rich applications of pigment. Drawing, always central to Lewis's practice, has lately assumed a still more dominant role, embodying in refined detail and tonal orchestration a realization of his constructive process. In View from the Studio (2003-04), a starkly lyrical drawing about 4 feet square, traceries of branches, darkened with graphite, stand in high relief against the worn paper of a wintry sky, while tangles of dead vines form white ridges against the darker house.

Over the rugged surfaces of the paintings, images float like luminous veils. Serios Pharmacy (2005), remarkably dense, recalls a Walker Evans photograph in its detailed rendering of signs, worn bricks and telephone wires, which here run alongside actual slices in the picture's surface. Nearby, a mailbox straddles a canyon of stratified canvas. Efforts to analyze this obsessive layering are ultimately frustrated, and we submit instead to its sheer material impact, which evokes the sublime. Lewis pursues anew his early, abstract ambitions in these heaving, lacerated surfaces, which extend our concept of realism. Yet there's pathos, too, in their reflection of the wear and tear of daily life: like the citizens of the communities he depicts, Lewis applies himself to his daily tasks, leaving viewers to reflect on the mystery of it all.--Hearne Pardee

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