Michelle Rosenfeld Gallery

Sheila Elias, Paul Critchley, and Massimo Barzagli take three distinctly different approaches to painting. Elias, an American, combines photography and collage to convey her unease following September 11. In the series "911" she combines bodies, buildings, street signs, rope, and paint to create a sea of turmoil. In #12 bodies tumble through space in tuck, pike, and twisting positions. Beneath them is a pastiche of sky-scrapers, the twin towers, and a swatch of the American flag, its stars like beacons of light and hope. In contrast, Italian artist Barzagli's oil and acrylic paintings impart a dreamlike vision of female nudes surrounded by gardens of vibrant blooms and tender grasses. In Lovely, Lovely Yellow Girl (2002) a nude woman, vaguely suggested by loose strokes of flesh-toned pigment, lies with her blurred face tilted skyward, her pale arms and golden calves engulfed in a tapestry of red, yellow and white flowers. The strongest paintings were those of the British artist Critchley, done in hyperrealist detail. His shaped and often movable pieces establish a sense of mystery. In Disconnected (2002), a canvas shaped like the corner of a room, two doorways face each other, with a hinged, working door between them. The left one reveals a staircase leading down where a man's hand appears on the railing, his body hidden by the wall. The right door exposes stairs leading up, with a woman's foot visible on a step. Beside the doorway a phone dangles on a cord, while a photo of a man protrudes from behind the phone's wall mount. Critchley's extraordinary attention to detail seduces viewers into believing that by moving the door, they can see into the stairwells. It was his cleverness and technical prowess that prevailed in this uneven show.

Mary Schneider Enriquez

 ArtNews Oct. 2002 pp. 157 - 58