Mary Neumuth Mito at Gerald Peters

Art in America, Sept, 2004 by Michael Amy

Mary Neumuth Mito lives and works near Santa Fe. Her first exhibition in New York in 20 years included drawings, lithographs and paintings in which the illusionism can be awe-inspiring. Fraught with intricate detail, these works are meant to match the realistic intensity of the photographs, taken outdoors, on which they are based. The subject is landscape, though approached from an unorthodox angle.

Neumuth Mito depicts the ground as seen from above, from the distance she establishes when standing and aiming her lens at the barren or freshly plowed earth lying just beyond her. From this vantage, the artist arrives at allover images that fill her entire compositions with carefully rendered elements that teeter at times toward formlessness. Hierarchies are imposed by grooves, cracks or stains in the earth, large stones or shadows. The compositions hark back to Monet's late Water Lilies, which likewise tilt a horizontally disposed motif toward the picture plane. However, Neumuth Mito's head-on depictions more readily evoke Dubuffet's renderings of rough terrain and Tapies's amalgams of sand and powdered marble. The titles she gives her works add a level of ambiguity to what is almost always banal subject matter.

Daughter Running (oil on canvas, 2003) is a vertical composition depicting a surface littered with countless stones of varying shapes and sizes. A thin, irregular dark brown stain, right of center, runs down the entire height of the painting. Whether it is a streak of water flowing down a dry riverbed or a cast shadow disrupting the almost monochrome field is unclear. Whatever its identity, it takes on the abstract quality of a flame or jagged tear. Neumuth Mito's oils are executed by painting a dark layer over a light one, then revealing areas of the underpainting with cotton swabs and cloth occasionally dabbed in turpentine.

The large oil Avenging Angel (78 by 117 inches, 2003; there was a smaller 2002 lithograph of the same subject on view) is a veritable tour de force. Light and shadow play dramatically across the imprint in snow of a person who had created the silhouette of an angel. Spread across the uneven terrain, this symphony of tonal contrasts seems to magnify the modest image into a windswept snow-covered mountain crest marked by deep crevasses. Such transformative mystery marks Neumuth Mito's most successful images, which enticingly hover between realism and abstraction.

--Michael Amy