During August Hackett-Freeman Gallery in San Francisco presented a selection of recent still-life paintings by James Aponovich, as part of the traveling exhibition “James Aponovich: A Retrospective,” organized by the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire. Aponovich’s paintings combine saturated, vibrant color with an almost-Platonic vocabulary of forms. In search of what he calls “true essence,” he approaches objects through a “kind of meditation.” The objects he depicts—ceramic vessels, opulent flowers and fruits, swags of patterned drapery—belong to a genre tradition that stretches from the Italian Renaissance and the Flemish Baroque to Cézanne. The fact that he sets his arrangements against a backdrop of cerulean sky and symmetrical landscape and townscape elements contributes to their historical resonance. Every successful still life is a carefully calibrated formal composition, however casual or inadvertent the arrangement appears at the first glance; even ephemeral objects, such as blossoms and foodstuffs, are translated into a more abstract realm of ideas. Aponovich explicitly evokes the rarefied air of an ideal world, rather than illustrating the process of decay, as in the Vanitas tradition, where every drooping petal carries a moral lesson.

James Aponovich Barga: Still Life With Amaryllis, 2005 Courtesy Hackett-Freedman Gallery, San Francisco

Yet Aponovich’s plants are convincingly lifelike. Married to a professional horticulturist and a gardener himself, he paints in conjunction with the seasonal cycle, making preliminary sketches from live bulbs and completing paintings during the winter. Perhaps this temporal displacement accounts, in part, for the transmundane quality of his compositions. Proportion is another important factor, especially the scale relationship between foreground and background. Pots and plants tower over the hills and villages of the backdrops, asserting a monumentality far removed from the intimacies of a tabletop in an interior. His tall, cylindrical vases and squat, round-hipped vessels have an abstract geometry that suggests Morandi, but the intensity of his color packs a surreal punch. In Barga: Still Life With Amaryllis (2005), the crimson maw of the central flower contrasts boldly with the exclamation-point-straight green stems and the deep indigo of patterned bowls, their arabesque designs echoed in the opulent drapery beneath them. The dramatic bouquet of Barga: Still Life with Bearded Irises and Tangerine (2005) is a tight explosion of violet and white. The tangerine perched on a ledge covered with a peacock-gaudy bit of fabric is as neatly rounded as a Renaissance dome, echoing the lollipop shapes of three green trees placed at regular intervals along the horizon line. With Barga: Still Life with Itoh Peonies (2004) the artist focuses on ruffled clusters of golden-yellow petals, like a sunburst against the sky. The collection of vessels arranged across the ledge—mimicking towers, pedestals and cupolas—has an architectural silhouette, blending in with the red-tile-roofed buildings clustered at the edges of the canvas, nestled against emerald-green hills. The fruit piled on the pedestal glows with an unearthly luminosity. Aponovich has exhibited nationally since the late 1970s, and his paintings appear in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Currier Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, Maine, and the Boston Museum of the Fine Arts. This exhibition is accompanied by a full-color catalogue with essays by curator Kurt J. Sundstrom and Howard Mansfield. Hackett-Freedman Gallery, 250 Sutter Street, San Francisco, California 94108. Telephone (415) 362–7152. On the Web at www.hackettfreedmangallery.com

Robert Stark’s oil-on-linen abstractions hover on the cusp of landscape. “Fresh Paint,” an exhibition of his recent work, is on view November 5–20 at Philippe Bonnafont Gallery. Until a decade ago Stark was a formal landscape painter but has now developed a new vocabulary of light and dark, warm and cool. Immersed in the act of applying paint, he compares his brushstrokes to heart-rhythms. His titles retain oblique allusions to places and events: Phelps Brook (2004), annotated as “painted on Phelps Brook, Keene Valley, New York, in August,” Isleta Sky, Susquehanna, Memory of Chico, Morandi’s Birthday (all 2005). Morandi’s Birthday is a typical composition, serene yet dynamic. Topographical ghosts are broken up in the paint-handling, and Stark works to communicate with the viewer through, in his words, “the energy of light, the mass of space, the emotions of shadows.” His combines colors—red, fleshly pink, sky blue, yellow—with black, white and grey. Manipulating tone values independent of local color is a perennial challenge for painters. The photographic aesthetic is perhaps the purest exercise in tonal effects, and Stark is an accomplished photographer who has had a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. In his paintings he layers color and tone, offering glimpses of juicy spots of color through blurred strokes of storm-cloud paint. The Visit (2005) is a big-scale work (54″ x 80″) that suggests clouds bleeding into reflecting water; his pigment has a fertile volatility that relates it to organic matter. Stark emphasizes the intuitive nature of the painting process: “I rely on the passage of time to sort out what sings and what needs to be scraped and used for the basis of a new painting.” The paintings in this show are certainly finished in the sense of having reached equilibrium, but they are never static. The viewer has a feeling of being in the moment with the artist as he creates. Stark maintains studios in northeast Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and Albuquerque. His work has been seen in solo exhibitions at the Phillips Collection, Cheekwood Fine Arts Center and Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art; his paintings have traveled to world capitals through the State Department’s Art in the Embassies program. Philippe Bonnafont Gallery, 946 Greenwich Street, San Francisco, California 94133. Telephone (415) 431–7546.

Steven J. Levin, Self-Portrait, 2004 Courtesy John Pence Gallery, San Francisco

John Pence Gallery has been cultivating contemporary realists for many years, with gratifying results. This fall two accomplished painters are being presented in solo shows, testifying to the vitality of the figurative revival. In his fifth one-man show at the gallery, on view from September 8 to October 1, 2005, Steven J. Levin demonstrated skill across a range of genres. A striking still life, Red Tulips, juxtaposes vibrant blooms against a rumpled swatch of subtle, blue-grey brocade; the curvy, clear glass bowl is a traditional opportunity for displaying old-master skill at transparency. The more up-to-date-looking Commuters is, on one level, a convincing depiction of quotidian existence: rumpled bourgeois passengers moving through a polished marble interior. Yet the symmetrical doors marking arrivals and departures suggest an allegorical narrative. The most ambitious of the works (all dated 2005) in the exhibition is Self Portrait, a nested conundrum of images within frames that hint at infinite regression. With almost trompe l’oeil effect, a pencil drawing taped to the easel makes its own commentary on the process of representation and the artist’s persona. The palette—scarlet shirt, amber-toned wood, black frame—adds to the boldness of the composition. Levin is one of the most talented students of realist revival master Richard Lack.

Presenting his tenth solo show at Pence, Will Wilson is a highly imaginative, even theatrical artist. Thirty new paintings, created since his last show in 2001, and thirty oil sketches are on view from October 7 to November 5, 2005. A meticulous craftsman whose labor-intensive works sometimes take a year to complete, Wilson cites the Dutch old masters and the Americans William Harnett and John Peto as influences. Trompe l’oeil is one genre this virtuoso of illusionistic space has conquered, but his range encompasses portraits, interiors, still lifes and what might be called allegories. His largest (48″x 52″) and most ambitious picture here, An Arrangement (2004), depicts twin brothers arranging giant peonies against a landscape backdrop. The titanic columns of the men’s bodies, naked to the waist, seem heroic, while the sensitive interplay of their faces suggests two aspects of a single personality. Wilson deliberately placed a deep blue sky behind the left-hand figure, an ominous cloud behind the one on the right. “For me,” he explains, “the two figures are the same person and this painting is meant to show, without being too devious, the constant give and take we all experience within ourselves.” The artist used tissue paper to experiment with specific placements for the peonies, yet in the finished work the flowers have a cool delicacy that is palpably tactile.

One of Wilson’s epic still lifes, Where the Woodbine Twineth (2002), has a similar metaphorical charge. The title—in one of those curious juxtapositions that often sets off the creative process—refers both to the ornate sinews of the vine basket at the center of the composition and, the artist remarks, to a phrase in a whimsical 1939 film about death, On Borrowed Time. The basket of lemons illustrates the life cycle of the fruit, from blossom and the hard, greenish unripe stage to voluptuous juicy yellow to wizened and brown. The plain, tenebrous background, simple stone table and swag of plush, russet velvet give the picture a Spanish feel, appropriate given that the great old master of the lemon is Zubáran. Wilson’s execution is stunning, the colors and textures vividly rendered. Beyond the prestidigitation of mimesis, however, lies the formal ingenuity of the composition: the single lemon suspended from above like a lamp in the night, the rhythmic repetition of arabesques in the tightly woven basket, the yearning green leaves of the young fruit and the graceful droop of dry branches.

Among the other works on display are Convexed (2003), a brilliant Renaissance-style self-portrait in a curved mirror, small paintings depicting mice playing kitchen-detritus instruments (evidence of Wilson’s offbeat sense of humor), Free Range (2004), a trompe l’oeil of a disturbingly reanimated plucked chicken, and A Year with Reynolds Price, the artist’s fifth portrait of the celebrated writer. To all these subjects he brings versatility and skill, reminding us that the magic of finish is as exciting a part of the aesthetic tradition as painterliness and surface texture. John Pence Gallery, 750 Post Street, San Francisco, California 94109. Telephone (415) 441–1138. On the Web at www.johnpence.com

American Arts Quarterly, Volume 22, number 4.