Max Halperen Correspondent 

Layers of the divine

The News and Observer 

January 24, 2003

    Andrea Gomez is one of the few painters in the area who, while working with the elements of landscape -- land, water, sky -- is not terrified by ideas.

     The work in her show at Raleigh Contemporary Gallery -- "Divine Milieu" -- is linked, she says, to words and concepts floated by the Jesuit priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, who saw man as evolving toward a state of ultimate spiritual awareness and being.

  For Gomez, the world, like man, is forever in motion, forever changing form and color. The atmosphere and clouds of her landscapes -- if that term can be used for these paintings -- often seem solid and faceted, heavier than the land beneath. But ultimately, the viewer's eye may be moved through churning clouds of deep reds, purples, blues, greens to pale evanescent regions of quiet in deep space.

    The best work in the show of eight oils and one watercolor is stratified, with two low thinly painted rectangles of land and sky at the bottom and foaming cloud formations above. Thus "Jerusalem" lies on a slab of deep green that may be land or water. It supports a rising cloud that spreads and in turn supports an explosion of dark clouds rushing in from the right, while other scrolling clouds, lighter in color but heavy with paint, rise to the top of the large canvas.

    In "Veiled Voice Over the Waters" a river of light flows sinuously through the canvas, separating dark red and purply clouds that are so thickly encrusted that they reach out of the canvas and are given the weight of stone. They are hemmed in by cloud forms that are lighter in color but still solid and almost faceted. Below them are two flatter areas, both horizontal: brownish land and a thinly painted sky with a kind of spout linking the land to the rearing clouds above.

    The boundaries are not as clear in "Sky Over Eden," however. Underwater foliage rises above a flat rectangle of water surmounted by thick banks of cloud or land that appear to hold another region of water. Above that, a fiery cloud lies within a circle of thickly painted clouds of reds and greens. But in the center, with land, cloud and water reaching for it, an area of thinly painted greens echoes the color of the lakes below.

    Whatever Chardinesque ideas and feelings may lie at the heart of these paintings, ultimately the near-Baroque twists and turns of their massive and colorful forms are quite moving and powerful declarations of the world's beauty. The Raleigh artist is not very far from the mind-set of some 19th-century landscapists when she notes that Chardin envisions us and our world as "engulfed in the layers of God's omnipresence."

Info

What: "Divine Milieu," paintings by Andrea Gomez.

Where: Raleigh Contemporary Gallery, 323 Blake St.

When: Through Jan. 31. Open Mon.-Sat., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.

More info: 828-6500, www.rcgallery.com.