Diligence may be the characteristic that most obviously united the painters in this tightly focused show of still-life paintings and drawings. The artist ranged from Olga Antonova, whose small-scale pictures of bowls, teacups and kitchen utensils looked relatively brushy in this fastidious company, to Steve Smulka, whose stock-in-trade is the virtuosic rendering of glass vessels and the distorted views through them. There was also a degree of gentle humor in a number of the works here, which must have provided the artist some relief from the fastidiousness of this sort of picture making. The humor was sometimes found in subject mater, as in Robert Jackson’s Strangely Related (2008), a painting that depicts fresh oranges balancing on an old-fashioned scale against bottles of orange cream soda.
More often, though, it appeared the artist’s amusement derived from the nature of representation itself. In Daniel Greene’s Throw ‘Til You Win (2008), at least as much effort was devoted to creating the illusion of green-patterned worked paneling in the background as to representing the balls and skittles in the foreground. Kirill Doron finds similar entertainment in pictures like Shoe From (2009), where part of the illusion lies in the suggestion that the picture’s surface is scuffed and distressed.
The standout work there, though, was Steve Mills’s Recycle (2009), in which both the subject matter—old copies of the Wall Street Journal tied up in piles and putout with the garbage-and its precise rendering, with the text copied in microscopic brushstrokes, draw attention to the fleeting nature of significance: a memento mori of our times, if you like.
-Robert Ayers