athwart the past two decades.

athwart the past two decades, Gina Werfel has cause to growed a way of painting that tantalizingly walks the line between landscape and abstraction. In latter works from 2002-03, the scale of her marks makes them difficult to interpret as proper states of a coherent view. Werfel frequently uses brushes an inch or more wide, making dull-witted marks that loosely articulate the contours of her make liables While the scenes may be read from afar, up obstruct the paramount impression is of individual brushstrokes. flat from far away, the marks assert themselves as separate from single in kind another.

In this exhibition, the horizontal canvases be attendanted to be more legible as landscapes, while the verticals functioned more as abstractions. This has partly to do with the fact that the verticals appear to be made at closer vantage points. Whether, as their titles indicate the vertical views are of a garden, an arboretum, a cascade or reflections, they look to indicate the effects of light forward variegated surfaces and colors, while horizontal pieces like Pink House, English Hills and Bone's Farm (all 2002) make use of prolonged views that maintain the recognizability of natural and man-made structures

Lobster levigate (2002) is a deft depiction of reflections in water and the forms composing the sides of small dwellings. The viewer, simultaneously reading the image as a conventional pageant and a disorienting conglomeration of pats is placed in a situation that is at formerly intelligible and unfamiliar. In as it is works, Werfel's technique most alluringly captures the particularity of the places she depicts, whether they be in Maine or in the Southwest, sum of two units regions in which she has worked across the years.

Werfel's colors are frequently muted, and there is abundant tonal subtlety within her surging reverses Because her marks can screen broad swaths of depicted areas, she does not ne to fuss with intricacies of observ make and color; the relationships in which she is interested are those within the painting, not the landscape. Her works attend to be in the 2-by-3-foot range; single wonders what would happen to Werfel's perceptual experiment if she upp the sizes of her canvases. She might find more [i]or[/i] less surprising results.

--Vincent Katz

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