Robert Berlind at Tibor de Nagy - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, Feb, 1995 by Nancy Grimes

A realist of sorts, Robert Berlind has always grounded his art in visual impressions of his immediate surroundings. For the last 20 years or so, he has captured his perceptions of places and, in a few instances, close acquaintances, in flickering, loosely knit images that imbue the familiar with a hint of mystery.

In his recent exhibition of paintings, Berlind took as his subject the reflections of treetops in pools of water. Spanning a four-year period beginning in 1990, the works zoom in on sections of water and translate mirrored patterns of limbs, foliage and sky into a fractured skein of painterly notations.

Each of the predominantly earth-hued canvases emanates a light peculiar to a specific time of year. Winter Reflections (1992) silhouettes an undulating web of bare branches against the muffled light of a snow-laden sky, while in Callicoon Creek (1993), a wind-ruffled stream, its surface dotted with a few fallen leaves, reflects the blue sky and warm olive-green foliage of late summer.

Although the ostensible subject of the work is the rhythms of nature--its cycles of growth and decay--as well as the interdependence of earth, air and water, the images function not only as representations but as metaphors. Berlind collapses the spaces of the distant sky, the treetops, the water's surface and its shadowy depths into a single shallow, ambiguous space. In so doing, he transforms the optical phenomenon of reflection into a metaphor for the mental activity of reflection. The boundaries between inside and outside, subjectivity and objectivity dissolve, just as the water's reflective yet transparent surface dissolves the difference between high and low, near and far.

Berlind's use of metaphor saves his paintings from triteness. After all, the interpretation of the forms of landscape as patterns of marks organized into an allover composition is a well-worn strategy in modern painting (Monet and Neil Welliver come immediately to mind). Yet, despite the familiarity of their conventions, Berlind's paintings succeed in rendering the banal poetic,