Kit Rank at David McKee - New York

Kit Rank is a 53-year-old painter, mostly self-taught, from Texas. Her first exhibitions took place in the mid-1980s, and she had her first New York show in 1999. Her resume suggests wanderlust: she studied woodcut and screenprinting with a group of Japanese students at the Art Students League in New York, then lived in Santa Fe, Fort Worth (her hometown), Connecticut and the Caribbean before settling into a farmhouse in Sicily, where she now lives and works.

Rank favors shallow, frontal compositions reminiscent of Japanese woodcuts and Indian miniatures as well as of American folk art. The pictures from her 1999 show are crammed with figures--stock characters from Chinese opera and Kabuki theater, nuns, animals and even the Virgin of Guadalupe--which achieve the perverse effect of keeping the viewer at bay. There is too much of everything, as the artist further patterns the paintings with decorative details. In Rank's recent works, there is less ethnic sampling though they continue to be populated by figures in costume (here mostly uniforms). The artist has reduced the random clutter. Rich color is a strong point. Rank relies on chalkboard green and red-ocher to charge her ketchup reds, deep blues, mellow whites and the modulated flesh tones.

Sicilian Kitchen (2002) is an antic dream unfolding in broad daylight. Brown-shirted (Fascist?) and other uniformed men gather to eat around a table near a pepper-festooned hearth. At the upper right, a traditional Italian mother--the kind one might find on the label of a spaghetti sauce jar--enters the room carrying a plate of coiled sausages; she is seen again in the lower left with her naked rear exposed. Watermelons open to spill french fries; a ladder pokes out of a table drawer. An open casket holds one of the Brown Shirts lying in state.

As alluring and quirky as Rank's imagery is, her greater talents are formal: color, composition and surface quality provide the real sustenance in the work. One longs for simpler, more honest fare--something she appears quite capable of producing.

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