Nebulas, starscapes, and clouds of color shimmer in a corridor of mirrors, creating a mood reminiscent of Carl Sagan's "Cosmos".
David Antonio Cruz's paintings of a nude exploding from clouds of color are on roughly the same scale, as are Diane Wah's scroll-like photo pieces.
They also evoke some great moments of preabstract whiteness: Turner's paintings of gales, Marsden Hartley's crashing waves, Cézanne's tablecloths and Mark Rothko's drifting clouds of color.
Here the walls are lined with paintinglike clouds of color (actually computerized neon) that slowly change from hazy blues to greens, or from oranges to magentas.
Atmosphere is still paramount, however, for her tones are translucent and interactive, as in "Seeing Red," with its rolling clouds of color.
Her approach was loosely the same, whether the subject was Greenwich Village, the rosary of her friend the poet Elizabeth Bishop, the dunes of Cape Cod or a few pieces of penny candy drifting through clouds of color like fish in an aquarium.
There are Rothkoesque hallucinations with bright, glowing clouds of color; Magritte-like hallucinations featuring surreal conflations of people's heads and objects; and Picasso-esque hallucinations in which faces are grossly distorted or composed of fragments — "a nose, part of a mouth, an eye, a huge head of hair, all juxtaposed in a seemingly haphazard way".
The nine paintings in "Monet's Water Lilies" run the gamut from the traditional landscape composition of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's "Japanese Footbridge, Giverny" (1895) to the astonishingly modern, essentially abstract clouds of color in the Museum of Modern Art's 20-foot mural "Water Lilies" (1914).
Equally important is his tenderness as he conjures clouds of color from the keys, or the hair-trigger control that enables him to modulate a thundering full-force gallop down the keys into a moment of gentle mezzopiano before resuming the charge, all in the same seamless phrase.
