Drama in the Margins

According to painter Rackstraw Downes (b. 1939), his upbringing by actor parents cured him of any interest in theatrics, and the presumptuous claims made for abstract painting drove him toward representation. Drama of another kind, however, abounds in his intense, peculiarly non-picturesque scenes of urban and rural sites. Beneath his exacting technique lie original perceptions and ferociously focused thinking. His nearly 20 recent paintings at the Betty Cuningham Gallery have a kind of straitened exuberance; they impress as radiant craft, but are moving, ultimately, for the independence and determination of his investigations.Mr. Downes’s subjects tend be unbeautiful, overlooked scenes galvanized by their spatial extremes. The broad vistas of Texas scrublands stream across several canvases with very wide formats; elevated highways and bridges soar through others. Executed on-site after numerous preparatory sketches, these paintings amount to portraits of spatial configurations rather than strictly of objects. Mr. Downs’s meticulous technique makes these marginal and forgotten sites seem elegant, almost crystalline, in their detail, but their most compelling aspect lies in the way his “uncompromising empiricism,” as he calls it, leads to vertiginous renderings of space.In the small painting “A Stop on the J Line (Alabama Avenue)” (2007), the sweep of an elevated subway line fills the breadth of the canvas, its curvature exaggerated as if viewed through a fisheye lens. The naturalism of the midday illumination and the plethora of details — down to the rivets on some girders — vie with the extravagant proportions of the structure, which dwindles drastically toward either side of the canvas, slipping away from us like a rock falling down a sunlit well.A similar drama animates the striking, nearly 6-foot-wide “The Pulaski Skyway Crossing the Hackensack River” (2007). This painting, too, combines an Eakins-like fidelity of light and detail with vertiginous accelerations of space toward the sides. The elevated highway’s main span is not quite symmetrical on the canvas, giving rise to new intrigues: A shelf of land at the lower right corner edges toward the closer section of the span; a power plant, perched at the far shore of a shimmering plane of water, leans slightly as it reaches toward the bridge’s vast arc.A photograph on the cover of the exhibition catalog provides clues to the artist’s working methods. It depicts what must be the very same canvas, mounted on two French easels anchored side-by-side to the ground with guy-wires. (“Plein air,” in this case, involves full-force wind.) Overhead arcs the Skyway, neck-twistingly high and close. Upon minute examination, every detail in the photograph — even a bent wire protruding through the foreground cement — reappears in the painting.In his eloquent writings, Mr. Downes argues that such paintings are truthful records of perceived events. He has a point: Our eyes can focus on only one point at a time, and large portions of our brains are devoted to joining these separate perceptions into seamless, practical experiences. Linear perspective is, after all, a graphic convention, not a physical law, and it breaks down for wide-angle views. (To prove this, stand in the center of the gallery’s larger space, facing one of the long walls. Its horizontal top edge pitches downward as it approaches either corner — a pencil held horizontally at arm’s length demonstrates this — which means that a drawing of the entire wall must connect these opposing angles in a broad curve.) Four very long paintings, 15 inches high and 8 to 10 feet long, depict a racetrack in the Texas scrub desert. There are no people in these dirt-blown scenes, but much evidence of human activity in the posts and railings dotting the barren vastness.From about 8 feet away, the paintings demand our physical engagement; we must turn our gaze to connect the multiple diagonals of tire tracks crossing the plain. At about 4 feet, we’re absorbed into an enveloping, shrubby-shrub plotting of the surface. Like all of Mr. Downes’s paintings, they reflect a unique combination of aggressive conception and passive elaboration. Fervent perceptions of space enliven their broad outlines; details follow, filling in the story of each site exactly “as is”; colors add atmosphere and light. At various points in the exhibition, his colors provide something else: a compositional urgency of their own. In a 2007 painting of Atlantic Avenue, for instance, evanescent yellow-grays poignantly convey the sweeping, overhead weight of the AirTrain cement guideway. In a canvas from 2006, the tiny glimmer of flood lamp reflectors, and the escape to a pinkish sunlit wall through a doorway, vividly punctuate the somber hues of a huge artist’s studio. And in that painting of the Alabama Avenue subway station, masses of color dramatically build as the central knotting of girders perforated by notes of sky. These integrations of the energies of drawing and color — with impulses of hue conditioning as well as responding to the forces of drawing — hint at what Corot so wondrously achieved in his early studies of Roman aqueducts and Mount Soracte.Mr. Downes’s non-hierarchical compositions more often preclude this sort of internal orchestration. But not always: My favorite moment of the exhibition occurs as a judge’s tower rises above the arid earth in one of the racetrack paintings. The humble structure — a welded steel armature topped by corrugated metal — faces us squarely across the parched landscape, its ridges caught in the raking light. This delicately striated square becomes the sole, resolute interruption of the relentless horizon. Nearby, three elements chatter: the roof of a spectator’s shelter, which hovers, a sliver of absorbent blue, above the raw tones of earth; its shadow, an even deeper, darker note beneath, and the purple-gray mass of hills miles away on the horizon, less regular in shape but equally anchored to the earth. The three pressures converse across a mysteriously vast distance, expanding its space more radically than the tire tracks plunging toward the horizon. What better evocation of the realities of color and line?Until March 1 (541 W. 25th St., between Eleventh and Twelfth avenues, 212-242-2772).

Drama in the Margins

Drama in the Margins

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