Courtesy Sara Meltzer Gallery, New York

Peter Rostovsky, "Target" (2008). Oil on canvas, 78 x 72 in.

March 2009 Reviews

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Peter Rostovsky’s photorealist paintings in his new show, "This Distant World," depict a range of disparate subjects, from disembodied children’s hands playing a game of cat’s cradle to a gas stove’s burner blazing. In the main room, three large canvases capture gymnasts during dismounts. As we look at them — frozen by the camera in midair and upside down, muscles straining, faces set — we have no way of knowing how their trajectories will end. Thinly brushed, the paintings feature grayed, tamped-down color, as if our remove from the events portrayed had translated into a leaching of contrast and saturation, like that of atmospheric perspective. Upstairs, four inky blue canvases reproduce X-rays of old master paintings, found, like the other images in the show, on the Internet; they include a portrait of a man by Rembrandt and Millais’s Ophelia. Another portrait, titled Anonymous, is unidentifiable and practically illegible beneath an intriguing maelstrom of irrelevant incident revealed by the X-ray. Painting coolly and impeccably, Rostovsky elevates fleeting moments and phenomena impossible to observe with an eye unaided by technology — film, video, digital, or online — in order, perhaps, to measure the distance of mediation from direct experience, be it of a painting in a museum or athletic prowess. But like a rebus with too-cryptic symbols, neither the precise meanings of the images themselves nor the puzzle of the exhibition’s divergent parts adds up to more than a hazy indeterminacy.

"Peter Rostovsky" originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' April 2009 Table of Contents.