In the small show titled “Still Life with . . .” at the Lyons-Weir Gallery, Sydney Licht reinvents this classic genre. A series of objects painted with gusto in crisp oil colors rests atop tabletops in a traditional format, but the artist has painted the objects with such minimal detail that it is not always clear what they are. (Most often, they are light bulbs.) This stylistic shorthand serves as a welcome contrast to the very decorative tablecloths often filled with dots and leaves. Licht has also moved the horizon line up higher and down lower in the compositions than is typical. As a result, the sense of intimacy or distance changes, and one becomes more a participant than a voyeur. At the Lyons-Weir Gallery, 300 W. Superior St., through Oct. 11.
Mark Metcalf’s first solo exhibition of oil paintings at Lydon Fine Art is a bittersweet tribute to an artist who died three years ago at age 36. Known for his industrial scenes, the self-taught, Texas-born artist had also painted bucolic, almost panoramic-style landscapes of waterways, bridges and dense foliage. His inspirations were his city life in New York, where he had a Brooklyn studio, and his country life (he had a cottage on the Hudson River in Kingston, N.Y.). With either type of subject matter, Metcalf incorporated sufficient detail within his quasi-representational/abstract expanses to fix a sense of place, though he deliberately did not include too much. There was an appealing, slightly generic, everyman’s style to his works, but what made them seductive was Metcalf’s ability to capture a mood through a subtle play of light, juxtaposition of light and dark colors, absence of human figures and use of angles. The latter may derive from a street veering off, as in “Ulster Village,” or a curving clump of trees and bushes, as in “Roundout.” At Lydon Fine Art, 301 W. Superior St. through Oct. 15
Michiko Itatani is known for her oversized shaped painted canvases with large nude figures that suggest they are frantically attempting to survive. The works in her small show of untitled mixed-media drawings on paper at the Printworks Gallery are still quite complicated and bring together a diverse assemblage of elements — including nude figures and body parts, parts of buildings (which reflect her travels), geometric lines, cell-like circles and gold and silver sparkles. The media also incorporate watercolors, graphite, prismacolor, collage and mylar. The mood of these drawings is surprisingly still and spiritual, perhaps reflecting the artist’s Japanese heritage. She achieves this effect through her choice of soft lyrical colors such as the predominant blues and pinks in “FR-6” and her suggestion of a vast limitless landscape in which parts seem to float effortless. These drawings seem to be the visual equivalent of a stream of conscious dialogue. At Printworks Gallery, 311 W. Superior St., through Oct. 11.
