on show at The Renaissance Studios, 130 West 57th Street, 13th Floor, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, New York City, 212 586 8342, through Monday only (noon to five)
Adam Van Doren’s lovingly nostalgic portraits of such iconic edifices as Oxford’s Radcliffe Camera or the Bridge of Sighs in Venice are unabashedly traditional, yet also deceptively so. His painterly idiom joins Anglo-Saxon empiricism and French jouissance – think Walter Sickert meets Albert Marquet. But occasional audacities with temperature, surface and color juxtaposition tweak the conservatism with refreshing inventiveness. The show takes place in the artist’s studio, one of New York’s hidden architectural treasures, a soaring, top lit beaux-art atelier once occupied by Childe Hassam – a setting commensurate with the idyll of Van Doren’s motifs.
This was an artcritical CAPSULE in December 2008
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