Revelations in a Dank Garden

By ROBERT HUGHES

In New York, a mystery cast by Jennifer Bartlett

Twentieth century art has always liked the random. Chance meetings of images, the weird threat an unfocused eye hooks from the normal texture of life: these have fueled the reverie and invention of innumerable artists. From De Chirico's piazzas to Steven Spielberg's suburbs, our culture is intermittently fascinated by the noonday goblin--the sense that something is askew within the well lit, the ordinary, and that the closer you peer the odder it gets. Jennifer Bartlett, whose recent paintings are currently on view at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Manhattan, is a connoisseur of this kind of unease. There are exhibitions that mark a full assumption of powers: the idiom is assembled, the grammar wrought, the experiences wholly understood. So it is with this show of Bartlett's, whose unlikely motif is a dull little French garden, and whose prevailing mood is an exacerbated sense of attentiveness, suspense and imbalance.

The paintings come, in part, from disappointed tourism. The south of France has drawn artists since Van Gogh; its blue, fouled coast is speckled with monumental names, Cezanne, Renoir, Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard. Though condos, fast-food chains and jammed autoroutes from Bordighera to the Camargue have somewhat dimmed its luster, it still possesses--especially for those who have not been there--a durable allure.

Jennifer Bartlett, born in Long Beach, Calif., in 1941 and a New Yorker for most of her working life, had never been there, and in 1979 she decided to get away from America for the winter by renting a villa in Nice. It turned out to be a dank monster, out of town but nowhere near the sea, with camphorated neighbors. The view consisted of a rectangular, tiled pool hedged with silvery artemisia bushes; at one end stood a garden-gnome lump of a reproduction putto, coyly peeing into the water. Beyond that, some straggly shrubs, a screen of cypresses and a few glimpses of the house next door, as ugly as hers--and, most of the time, rain. So much for Dick and Nicole Diver's paradise.

Being stuck with the lease, Bartlett stayed there, and having nothing else to do she drew the view from her window, over and over again--a total of nearly 200 studies of the pool, the boy, the gravel, the cypresses, the shadows. She drew on the spot, from photographs and later from memory; the banal content of the failed holiday slowly acquired a precision through being shuffled, isolated, winnowed. The final result is a group of eight large paintings in which the schematic dissection of the garden that Bartlett carried out in her drawings is rethought, the elements locked together in atmospheric and sinister grandeur.

Bartlett is a deft maker of marks; she understands the syntax of representation so well that hardly an inch of surface goes slack. The way she renders the dusty black recesses of a cypress, or the paddle-like leaves of a foreground plant, or the lunar speckling of artificially lit gravel--and does it in terms of relentlessly agile movements of a broad brush--is a lesson in decisiveness. It would be hard to think of more fluent paint handling in current art than the set of three views of the tiled tank, named Pool, 1983. One reads it from left to right; each time the eyeline -- obviously derived from handheld photos, whose careless tilt is preserved -- rises a little more, so that the final image, where one looks almost straight down at the pool bottom, presents a shock like the revelation of evidence.

The tiles are streaked and blotched with rust and orange algae, sweeps and daubs of pigment; the untended pool might have been the scene of a murder, a nastiness complicated but not denied by the big, squishy peony blooms floating on the water. It is Bartlett's aide-memoire, the cam era, that sets the strange flavor of these images. She will paint four or five versions of the same view, shifting position a little each time; the effect is not one of Warhol-like repetition, but rather of alert, frustrated scrutiny, as though the scene held the key to some forensic mystery that lies just under the eye but is too obvious to see.

In this garden, nothing apparently happens because time has apparently stopped, and Bartlett's images of frame-by-frame shift are a way of shaking it back into life. The place is so ambiguously quiet that after a while the kitschy little statue starts to come alive. Small changes take on enhanced significance, as in Wind, 1983, where the whipping of the cypress fronds, black as gnawed brushes against an unmemorably blank sky, is al most the only change (apart from eyeline) from one panel to the next. In this way --paradoxically enough, in view of her constricted subject -- Bartlett emerges as a master of narrative tone. There is more in her garden than could ever have met the house agent's eye.

-- By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.