MERLIN JAMES: Painting to Painting
New York Studio School

Merlin James, a Glasgow-based painter who also writes extensively on art, is equally fascinated by the masters and by the textural possibilities of paint. At the Studio School, he brings the two together in ways that by turn compel, provoke, and puzzle.

With an exuberant range of styles, Mr. James recasts in modernist idioms the paintings of a multitude of masters, most of them pre-20th century. Often he concentrates on a single, obscure detail, which makes the gallery’s brochure indispensable for identifying the original. (An excellent Web page, www.nyss.org/james, provides images of Mr. James’s work and his sources.) Viewed en masse, his more than 30 canvases become a mischievous, kaleidoscopic field guide to western art since Titian.

Mottled lights and darks in “Haarlem Lock” (1987) faithfully re-create the atmosphere of the 17th-century Dutch landscapist Hobbema. “Demos” (1983–84) revisits Delacroix’s “Demosthenes on the Seashore” with black and pink brushstrokes that echo the original’s restless drawing while jettisoning its color. “Castaways” (1984) and “Boat” (1984)” are both derived from the same two paintings of crowded rowboats by Delacroix and Manet; James’s linear, diagrammatic modeling, however, comes far closer to the spirit of Sigmar Polke.

The holes cut into some paintings, the squiggle of hot-melt glue on a canvas edge, the bits of applied feather, wood, and fabric — all confirm an approach that is equal parts whimsy and admiration. Mr. James’s intentions, though, are finally too mobile to pin down. He plainly isn’t searching for a modern equivalent of Giotto (the elderly Matisse’s stated aspiration), nor a postmodern sociopolitical dissection, à la Polke. What is clear is that he intends to savor, along his way, a painter’s materials and textures.

John Goodrich

Until March 24 (8 W. 8th St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-673-6466).

ODD NERDRUM
Forum Gallery

Odd Nerdrum happens to be one of the strangest artists around, which is saying something. An exhibition at the Forum Gallery spotlights what he has been up to over the past few years, and the news is good.

His dominant formal theme has long been a chiaroscuro so intense as to make Caravaggio’s seem sunny by comparison. In his newest work, however, Mr. Nerdrum uses this motif to far greater effect than in the past, in order to illustrate the sundry demons of his tumultuous imagination. Among these creatures are floating, rising and sinking nude forms, anemic and pale, that appear alternately blessed and damned.

Chiaroscuro has always tempted artists to use its opulent darkness to conceal their weaknesses in drawing. In Mr. Nerdrum’s earlier work, one was always acutely aware of such concealment, especially in comparison with the Old Masters whom he wanted to emulate.

In these latest paintings, however, he has achieved a much juicier use of pigment in the past. It is not consistently employed, but there are many highly satisfactory passages of paint that attain to that sense of liquid life that has surely inspired him in the impastoed textures of men like Rubens and Goya. At the same time, the paint can coalesce into sharp details that are artistically useful.

Traditionally, one of the weaknesses of Mr. Nerdrum’s art has been a very shaky understanding of the compositional formulae of the Old Masters. In his latest works, he does not conquer this problem so much as he sidesteps it. And he does this with a schematic and modern, almost modular composition. Rather than complex interaction, the figures either appear in isolation or are arrayed statically across the entire canvas. This strategy has its own rewards.

James Gardner

Until March 17 (745 Fifth Ave. at 57th Street, 212-355-4545).