Publication: Journal Santa Fe Section; Date: Jun 25, 2010; Section: Gallery Guide; Page: S8

Land- and viewscape painter invites physical interactions with the work SHARING THE

ATMOSPHERE History Is Not Past

MALIN WILSON-POWELL

For the Journal

By the time Woody Gwyn moved to Cerrillos, N.M., from Texas in 1974, the artist had fully developed his signature style. Since that time he has exhibited manyrefinements and variations on large sun-blasted horizontal canvasses of Southwestern sky and pavement, with oblique points of view and a palette almost exclusivelyconsisting of shades of sky blue against shades of orange and yellow. On view in his current exhibition of 26 paintings from 2005 to 2010 –– an unusually large number,especially for an artist whose technique is so painstaking — Gwyn explores new formats, new color spectrums, and enlivens the work he is best known for with astronger emphasis on painting as object.

Gwyn says he finds truth and beauty “in the way things are,” and the ways things are for the artist has “expanded,” as is noted in the exhibition title. There is still adominant physicality and specificity of place, as well as a distinct sense of absolute stillness, but there is evidence of notable reorientation. While Gwyn has always beenadroit at sharp edges and long crystalline views of arid climes, a few of the newer paintings enlist all shades of green, including the steamy, lush foliage of Hawaii in avertical, horror vacui, close-to-claustrophobic composition. Another very green square-format canvas renders the portrait of a grand old specimen ash tree andmasterfully uses a wash to evoke misty receding hills. Titled “Midday,” 2010, this painting feels like an introduction to an important personage and, in fact, the tree is ona historic Virginia farm, and was noted in a survey of the property by George Washington as a boundary marker.

My favorite juxtaposition in the LewAllen Gallery installation is the startling “Espinoza del Diablo” (2009), a 1-by-14-foot New Mexico panoramic composition depicting asmack-your-eyes-out neon sky against the jagged silhouette of two hogback ridges that drop away to leave an absolutely empty center. It is flanked by “Bosque” and“Bosque II” (both 2009), two much smaller and more intimate and relaxed viewscapes. Their ease and tender, fluid quality may be a result of the bosque’s proximity andfamiliarity to the artist, who has made his home in the Galisteo basin for decades. The morning light and sense of wind is especially sweet in “Bosque.”

Perhaps the most startling expansion of Gwyn’s brand of viewscapes is a further lengthening and narrowing of his already extended horizontal formats, as well as a newfrothy liveliness of the paint surfaces and edges. The longest, skinniest paintings on view are only one foot high and 16 feet long. These are all slices of the Pacific Oceanas seen from coastal pavement at the westernmost edge of our continent. From the evidence on the walls, it is Gwyn’s encounters with the visually limitless ocean andthe dematerialization of light on the surface of the sea that literally stretched his canvasses and, paradoxically, prompted a new materiality in his paint handling.

His extremely elongated formats mean the viewer must physically engage with the work to see it. You need to move forward and up close to observe the remarkabletextural details. You need to move sideways to traverse the topography of the paint and peripherally experience the unfolding changes in the intensity of light –– whichfeels like a cinematic, ambulatory journey. And, finally, to view the whole, it is necessary to back up and to back up again. In this way Gwyn recapitulates perceptual andbehavioral shifts of scale that occur when encountering the natural environment. For we humans the world is mostly made of surfaces. It is our nature to perceiveprocesses, changes, sequences, events within events, and forms within forms.

These long strip images with a small perch of land at either edge are mostly paintings of the surface sheen with indeterminate miragelike zones where sky and seamerge. Using a palette of marine and white paint, one of Gwyn’s expansions here is his handling of the reverberating flux of light that is both reflected and absorbed. Hisvaporization and diffusion of light where air and water interface are concretized with emphatically activated painterly surfaces of the water, as well as slathers of paintthat create wavy profiles on the edges of the stretchers. The shadows of these edges are animated and visually vibrate. Despite Gwyn’s self-identification as a maverickpainter, in a 1983 article Gwyn was quoted as saying, “I am creating an object, I hope, of my own vision.” The deployment of painting as physical object, i.e., objectsthat set up complex physical interactions with the viewer, was a major theme for post-minimalist artists of the late 1960s and 1970s. It was a revelatory, theatricalmoment in American art that is foundational to later developments.

The implications of such physical engagements with object/paintings can be profound. Unlike abstract, formal, intellectually remote concepts of mathematical space,these legacies from post-minimalism avoid the false struggle of the unique observer and the reduction of the world to a single individual’s identity. This kind of workasserts that we are all moving in a shared medium of atmospherics. None of us is the center of the universe. Even though our consumer culture would have us believeeach of us is a still point, the layout of Gwyn’s recent Pacific Ocean paintings are one embodiment of ambient environments that surround and include us.

If you go

WHAT: “WOODY GWYN: Expanded Views”

WHERE: LewAllen at the Santa Fe Railyard, 1613 Paseo de Peralta

WHEN: Through July 25. Gallery hours: Monday-Saturday 10-6; Sunday by appointment.

COST: Free

CONTACT: 505-988-3250 or info@lewallengalleries.com

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“Lamy” is a 2009 oil on panel by Woody Gwyn.

COURTESY LEWALLEN GALLERIES

“Midday” is a 2010 oil on linen by Woody Gwyn.

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“Espinoza del Diablo,” a 2009 oil on linen, is a 1-foot-by-14-foot New Mexico panorama by Woody Gwyn.

“Bixby,” a 2010 oil on linen, is a 1-foot-by-16-foot Pacific Coast panorama by Woody Gwyn.

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