Material Witnesses

Gallery-Going

By MAUREEN MULLARKEY
February 15, 2007

Contemporary culture makes a rumpus over self-expression but neglects discipline and method. Amid the hubbub, two quiet, contemporary painters stand out for the quality of their composure and their patient commitment to developing a steadfast eye: Susan Jane Walp, exhibiting at Tibor de Nagy, and John Morra, opening today at Hirschl & Adler. Both excel at representation built on linear probity and formal design principles. Although the character of their realism differs, each raises depiction to an act of witness to the goodness of the material world.

Ms. Walp has been painting still lifes with monastic exclusivity for two decades. Through the years, her work has grown richer and more lyrical. On her canvases, prosaic things — grapefruit halves, a pomegranate, a cardboard container of blueberries — enter into that "anticipatory state of glory" that theologian Hans Küng once said was the ultimate function of the fine arts.

Max Friedländer famously wondered how it happened that "a lemon, a herring, and a wine glass can be regarded as objects worth painting in themselves." He traced the germination of still life, in the Netherlands, to the eventual freedom of painters from an obligation to edify. Yet Ms. Walp, in her art, remains a Florentine for whom the phenomenal world bespeaks a grace that heralds something beyond immediate perception. This is what Stephen Westfall, in the exhibition catalogue, rightly calls "the votive aspect" of her compositions.

"Nasturtiums" (2005) and "Vase With Two Zinnias and Xerox" (2004) are appealing homages to Euan Uglow. But Ms. Walp's strength resides in more faceted compositions that, though built on a central axis, make nimble use of subordinate asymmetries to invigorate the hieratic stasis. Some imbalances are subtle shifts of color and tone, as in the delicious "Nuts in a Tin Bowl with Two Bricks" (2006); others are concrete and assertive. The contents of "Blueberries With Cork, Knife, Bean and Kale Leaf" provide diagonals to stir the serenity of the central elements.

Ms. Walp's touch — matte, spare and delicate — is exquisite. That, and reticence before her motifs, links her painting to the example set by Spanish realist Antonio López Garcia. Her words ring true in her work: "Still life asks for a kind of humility and I like that about it — working from a place where the usual demands of the ego are not so helpful and can be temporarily ignored."

Mr. Morra's art is more aggressive and wider in range. A former instructor at the Water Street Atelier, he pitches camp among socalled Classical Realists who advance 19th-century academic technique as the nonpareil of painting. An ideology of depiction, Classical Realism stuffs an old rabbit back into the hat for the express purpose of pulling it out again.

That said, Mr. Morra is more than a technician. Although he risks betting the store on facility (rather than on the imaginative qualities served by it), he, like Ms. Walp, seeks amplitude in the ordinary. This is a moral impulse distinct from skills. It is wonderfully present in his Merz series. These are architectonic still lifes of vintage tools and kitchen equipment: 1950s mixer, juicers, basters, furnace gears, oil cans, eggbeaters, bottles — salvage from tag sales, junkyards, and that virtual dump, eBay. With a titular nod to Kurt Schwitters, the paintings confess, rather than displace, his modernity.

"Merz No. 10" (2006) is a stuntman's paradise, gleaming with reflections and transparencies within transparencies. (Note that lightbulb inside a glass container.) High-wire acts thrill us because the performance is hard-won, and a slip could be fatal. But there is much more here than circus. Like every work in this splendid series, the composition rises above dazzle and invites interpretation. An enamel Sunbeam mixer, dignified in chiaroscuro, beckons to be understood as something larger than a prop.

The wares are outmoded yet the assemblage is elegiac, not nostalgic. In "Merz No. 11" (2006), industrial oddments, in saturated warm tones, play above the cool blues of a cast-iron stove stamped with the logo "New Idea." It yields a heated metaphor for a manufacturing past, which was once a source of national pride and power. A subtle pathos runs through the series like the sound of a muffled drum.

Here, Mr. Morra's essential subject is his own time reflecting on its own past. It is a kind of double vision that elicits from him an individuating discernment untapped by his landscapes and fruit-and-vegetablescapes. These last are oddly anonymous. They might have been painted by anyone, from Water Street to Beijing, schooled in traditional technique. (Academic painting by skilled Chinese artists is one more import increasingly visible.) It is Mr. Morra's opulent configurations of American industrial bric-a-brac that are distinctive and compelling.

The visual world calls each age to revisit it afresh. Because earlier ages have depicted great things — or little things in a great way — does not relieve our own from doing its part. Ms. Walp's and Mr. Morra's quotidian solemnities demonstrate why painting still matters.

Walp until March 10 (724 Fifth Ave., between 56th and 57th streets, 212-262-5050);

Morra until March 17 (21 E. 70th St., between Madison and Fifth avenues, 212-535-8810).