Andrew Sendor at Caren Golden

A heavy curtain blocking the gallery's front door and smoky gray walls set a somber tone for the oil-on-Plexiglas paintings in "Is There More to Life Than Bread, Blood and Bicycles?," New York-based Andrew Sendor's second solo show at Caren Golden. The cryptic title of the show--not to mention the verbose, scientifically minded names for individual works--didn't shed much light on the meanings behind the hyper-glossy, mysterious paintings (all 2006 or '07). Luckily they stand on their own.

The most striking work in the front room was a diptych, its two panes of limpid black Plexiglas meeting at a right angle in a corner of the room. The left panel features an elderly couple in head-to-toe black Victorian dress, floating side by side in a turbulent sea/sky hybrid. The couple is reflected in the otherwise blank adjacent panel in barely visible shades of coppery brown. Just left of the seam, a baby with puckered lips, an oversize head and piercing blue eyes (matching those belonging to the old man) sits awkwardly in a chair. For the most part, this and other works in the show are photorealistic, with occasional painterly touches accenting the figures' faces, or thicker globs of paint forming rocks or tufts of grass. The high-gloss paint that in some places looks like it was applied with a squeegee plays off the wide borders of blank, mostly black Plexiglas; when I was at the gallery, someone was walking around polishing the surfaces with a cloth.

In With many kinds of animals, man included, the sex organs are efficient in the highest means of expression (a relatively concise example of Sendor's abstruse titles), pink fades into orange and then gold on a support of cherry-red Plexi. A toddler in an old-fashioned olive-green dress with a high lace collar and puffed sleeves stares solemnly out at the viewer, her arm resting on a table that also holds colorful flowers and, inexplicably, a wrinkly brain. Other works nearby showed more young children posed in odd settings--on felled trees in dark forests, accompanied by birds--as if forced to confront nature in uncomfortable, unnatural ways.

The Complex Relations of All Animals and Plants to Each Other in the Struggle for Euphoric Existence is a group portrait of a family in early 20th-century dress seated against a majestic landscape of a snow-capped mountain dissolving into clouds. All nine sitters wear similar drab clothing and share matching misshapen faces: heavy-lidded eyes, ears that stick out and heads lolling slightly to the left. It's reminiscent of portraits of royal families in which inbreeding leads everyone to have the same bug eyes or lantern chins.

The idea of man fighting an overwhelming battle with nature is etched across all of Sendor's paintings. The lush, epic landscapes and lively natural phenomena in the background are more vivid than the subjects' faces, which are shrouded by a creepy, catatonic haze. It's as if the battle has already been waged, and nature won.

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning