Hearne Pardee at Bowery - Brief Article

Art in America, June, 2001 by Carl Little

Hearne Pardee has traveled widely to paint on-site in Alaska, Yosemite Valley, Texas, Italy and elsewhere. He has always had a solid grasp of the landscape, and he renders the various elements of his chosen scenes with assurance, from a granite ledge in Maine to the rooftops of New York City.

Three bodies of work were represented in Pardee's ninth solo show at Bowery (he has been exhibiting there since 1981): oils on linen, acrylics on panel and graphite drawings on panel. Most of the new oils were painted during stays in France, in Pont-Aven in 1998 and in Toulouse last summer. Pastoral views, like Mansonville and Fields Near Bardiques (both 2000), make use of a simple palette of browns and greens for the cultivated land and blues for the sky. Beach at Raguenez (1998) is a coastal prospect that recalls New England in its rugged beauty.

In contrast to these somewhat romantic images were several views of the E.O. Smith High School near the artist's home in Connecticut (he is a professor of art at the University of Connecticut at Storrs). As presented, the mundane setting--a football field with a track and low-lying institutional buildings--lacks the visual appeal of even Rackstraw Downes's industrial sites or Linden Fredericks's factories and mini-malls. Pardee's views may serve as a commentary on the drabness of the suburbs, but there's little else to recommend them.

Many of the works on panel include collage elements in the form of acrylic-painted pieces of paper affixed to the picture. In Depot Campus (2000) and House in Pont-Aven (1999), the mosaiclike arrangement of color fragments nearly obscures the underlying sketches. In another work, South Eagleville (1999), only a few painted pieces randomly accent a graphite rendering of a rural road. There's something engaging about this masking of the view, as if the artist were attempting to artificially heighten an otherwise neutral scene, using whatever colors he wishes. At the same time, a play of surface and depth is established, which is especially effective in a nonlandscape piece, Butterflies (1999). Here, winged insects seem to struggle to escape their collage confines.

With only one misstep, Pardee played to his strengths in this show, both returning to the handsome landscapes that are his stock-in-trade and pursuing new avenues that invite further and fuller development.