Adele Alsop at Alexandre

Adele Alsop's new Utah-scapes were greeted in the New York media by much burble and gurgle. Words fail us, as Alsop's bipolar stroke and perfervid hues rise, each time, to the picturesque occasion; each canvas is, in short, a love affair with its own physical and spiritual self, like the best love affairs, egregiously short and jarringly sweet.

Bierstadt and Blakelock are Alsop's 19th-century predecessors, while the Action painters--especially de Keening--and Neil Welliver, with whom she studied with at Yale, are her immediate forebears. Alsop proves her painterly peerage as she goes. This is nee-romanticism of the most ambitious sort; the "pathetic fallacy" so dear to the 19th century (that nature distinctly mirrors human hopes, emotions and desires) is here revived with an all-embracing vengeance, mellifluous as it is magical.

Magic, indeed, is the subject of a number of the paintings, a fact that is generally overlooked. In truth, Alsop has a lively interest in all sorts of magical arts, especially astrology. Thus, we shouldn't be too surprised to see, in Dream of a Dream (Sonno de un sonno), 2002, a circle reminiscent both of Matisse's La danse and a witch's-sabbat daisy chain, including a leaping panther, geese and swans and nude humans, all topped by a low-lying Utah mountain in rusty reds and siennas.

Still, the purer sorts of landscapes and some glorious still lifes carried the day here. Alsop's abstract figurative technique--for want of a better phraseology--is so precise in its evocations that, as in the 24-by-26-inch Big Pine Sunset (2001-02), a mere dot, squiggle, line or loop stands for both itself and its own picturing of itself, making for a kind of abstract symbolism that has pure vision as its vision.

The Action painting influence is everywhere to be seen, and what a relief in today's video/installation melee. Still, it's amazing that an artist so well versed in the 20th century should so fluently be able to call up a painter like Rembrandt, in the fulsomeness and acuity of stroke and hue in Quicksilver Pond (2002), brusque and brash grays, silvers and whites smartly echoing the title.

The still lifes on view were a small, but choice, lot. Alsop manages to bring her landscape sensibility whole to these pieces, altering neither the intimacy nor the piquancy that are hallmarks of the genre. In the square, medium-scaled Zinnias in a Passing Thunder Shower, the ghost of Redon hovers over the flowers, bringing a new, positive meaning to the word "florid." But it is really Alsop's own spirit that hovers over and, somehow, inhabits all her work. This painter is far and away the most stunning and achieved of her generational peers.

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group