Jake Berthot at McKee - Brief Article

Spaced far apart on the gallery's generous walls, Jake Berthot's paintings almost looked like dark postage stamps. The largest among the 16 oils on panel and four graphite studies on paper (all but two dated 2001) was 25 7/8 by 23 1/2 inches, and most of the works measured half that size. The small scale is striking and significant, but it's only part of the stow. Berthot, long known for his abstract paintings, moved from New York City to the rural Hudson Valley in 1996 and began to paint his surroundings. Surprised responses to his new works compared him to Cezanne and Ryder.

In this recent exhibition, he still paints trees, rocks and meadows, yet with little light, air or expansiveness. His outdoor scenes have the tenor of interior brooding. He paints in shadows, at twilight, at night or under storm-bronzed skies. Even the few views to a distant skyline end in an odd feeling of flatness and obstruction. It's a theatrical effect: middle-ground trees are like the wings of a stage set, and the far view has the opacity of a painted backdrop. These works seem to be engaged in a spatial sorting out and a struggle to establish place. Trees are like opponents; they don't offer the conventional pleasures of enclosure, protection and comfort. The small sizes of the canvases minimize nature, cut off its grandiose effects. The landscapes appear here on Berthot's terms, hemmed in, nailed down.

This effect may be the consequence of a longtime abstractionist facing the limitless space of the natural world. The curtailment has a weirdly fascinating power. For one thing, most of the paintings, in their warm, dark browns, olives and yellow-greens, look oppressively heavy. In addition, the big trees that dissolve into dark fields insinuate a sort of grim spirituality, a hint of wood sprites or trolls. The trunk of Oak at Field's Edge is broad, solid and tactile, but the lower branches are shadows, and the leaves and shrubbery dissolve into a green miasma. All escape is closed off.

Approaching Night (for Ryder) reminds me not of Ryder but of Thomas Cole's dark landscape. prints of the stages of life. Here, amid the usual grounded immediacy, is a hint of God in the clouds. Reconsidering the few spots of illumination in these paintings--the whiteness at the margin of Bridge Rock, the glimmer of the Catskills' peachy light in Meadow's Edge, the green horizon band in McGary Hill--it seems to me that Berthot is working his way out of something, seeking the light.

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group