Neil Jenney at the Whitney Museum - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, April, 1995 by Robert G. Edelman

The intimate main-floor gallery of the Whitney Museum was an ideal setting for a modest but revealing collection of landscape paintings by Neil Jenney, covering his work from 1978 through last year. In a darkened room that provided a cathedral-like hush, the luminous, heavily framed paintings were spotlit for maximum effect. It took some time (fortunately, there were benches installed) before the anomalous aspects of Jenney's obsessively detailed pastoral vistas emerged. The bold-lettered text that appears beneath each painting provides the initial clue that something might be awry in these pictures-especially in something as ominously titled as Acid Story. The cumbersome black frames, which all but overwhelm the delicacy of Jenney's renderings, can be seen as either prosceniums for nature's transmutation or as coffins within which one can view the slowly decaying "corpse" of the American landscape.

Jenney's slightly jaundiced viewpoint can be traced back to his "Bad Paintings" of 1969-70. That series consisted of comic and matter-of-fact juxtapositions of two objects, related by proximity and depicted with juicy brushstrokes; the frame texts often add a droll punchline. Although his painting technique has changed dramatically, Jenney's focus on the relationship between distinct objects in a carefully delineated space has remained consistent.

Under the guise of updated Hudson River School paeans to the North American landscape, Jenney introduces some fairly subtle touches that undermine any suggestion of the picturesque or the sublime. In North America Divided (1990-94), a scene of a pile of rocks and an old fencepost appears innocuous enough, until one spots the bent, rusty nails in the post and a large metal bolt in a small puddle in the foreground. The branches of the pine tree in Acid Story (1 983-84), depicted up close with an almost perverse scrutiny, are nearly stripped of needles. These details, understated as they are, establish a mood that is darkly ironic, if not foreboding.

Although the message is rather obvious, Jenney's precise handling of his subject, in method recalling the tempera painting of the Northern Renaissance, evinces the rigorous observation of a scientist. The simplified, overlapping forms and repeated sequences of cattails, trees and clouds in Venus from North America (1979-86) are reminiscent of some of the late works of Charles Burchfield and Marsden Hartley, and the angularity of North America Abstracted (1978-80) seems like a quirky homage to Arthur Dove with a dash of Rockwell Kent's homespun realism thrown in for good measure. Jenney's most elegiac work is also his most restrained. The twig trapped in the barbed wire that runs the length of North America Divided (1 991-93), and the tiny violet clouds seen against a warm sky, convey a poignancy and conviction that even the artist's biting commentary cannot subvert.