Ed McCormack

                 Gallery and Studio magazine review 2008,                               (Copyright Gallery and Studio Magazine)

Volume,10, No, 5 New York / June, July, August, 2008

FULL ARTICLE

In his book " Objects on a Table" Guy Davenport states, "That the kinship of still life with still life down through history is greater than that of landscape with landscape, or portrait with portrait, lies at the center of its mystery," and adds, "Reiteration is a privilege of still life denied many other modes."

Although Davenport's theory is interesting, he's obviously unfamiliar with the highly original still life compositions of Alphonse lane an artist who holds an M.F.A. from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and exhibits at Monkdogz Urban Art in New York, whose work can be seen on his website: Alphonselane.net

For Lane, who works in a meticulous and pristine style in oil on panel, objects on a table  invariably take a turn for the surreal. Aside from occasional departures from his usual format-an intriguing composition of floating figurative fragments and symbols called "Sage of Crystals" ; a moody stylized landscape called  "Fallen Sun Flower" - most of his compositions center on one or more floral arrangements lined up frontally against a background of a single, pale hue. However, the petals and fronds of the flowers resemble tendrils; their leaves possess a serpentine sinuousness; their colors appear to parody rather than imitate nature: odd pastel hues, tending toward soft, smokey yellows, olive greens, mauves and baby blues.

The vases and pots that Lane paints are often in similarly offbeat colors and their shapes can be just as fanciful, as seen in "Exotic Vases," where pink and pale violet vessels with curved handles   rival for their baroque contours the bizarre plant forms that they hold. Lane's apparently imaginary plant species sometimes suggest alien life forms of an almost sinister sensuality, as flora take on the qualities of fauna, assuming postures that can seem tortured, wounded, even malign.

Two of his most overtly anthropomorphic paintings are "Windmill Flower" and "Dyeing Limbs" where the plants and their vessels merge visually to suggest single figures  gesturing dramatically. Giving the lie to Davenport's theory of sameness, Lane differs significantly from earlier still life painters, such as the Dutch masters or Morandi, in that he seems less concerned with the play of light on surfaces or formal juxtapositions than with the emotional resonance of inanimate objects.

 This is not to imply that Lane is neglectful of formal values; quite the contrary: it is his exquisite sensitivity to form, spatial relationships, and subtleties of tone and color that lends his compositions their underlying tension. On one level, his paintings can appear as austerely arranged and uninflected in style as those of William Bailey, another  contemporary  painter who invests still life with peculiarly suggestive qualities. But while Bailey"s tabletop line-ups of China cups, canisters, clayware, and the occasional egg, smoothly painted in subdued hues, have reminded some critics of metaphorical cityscapes, Lane's paintings are all the more remarkable for his ability to imbue an equally restrained technique with a deeper psychological suggestiveness by virtue of his fanciful subject matter.

In Lane' Painting "Olive Mist" for example there is the suggestion of a familiar relationship between the three objects that make up the composition. The two taller plants inhabit blue and purple vases, respectively. Waving their fronds like arms, they appear to fawn over the smaller plant in a squat yellow pot between them. While the latter sits self-contained, like a baby Buddha, its odd blue and red petals and symmetrical leaves flourishing, the other two seem to shrivel and wane, as though drained by their doting concern.

While such interpretations are admittedly subjective and probably touch upon meanings never intended by the artist, it seems safe to surmise that each viewer who scrutinizes Lane's work will come up with equally far-fetched conclusions of his or her own. So subtly evocative are these paintings that one can't help reading all manner of things into them. And Lane obviously does nothing to discourage such imaginative forays on the part of the viewer when he names a composition comprised of three objects, the central one tall and red with pink petals sprouting out of it like tongues of flame, "Fire Vase" or titles another composition, "These Flowers Never Die."

Something of a mysterious departure for it's outdoor setting is a painting called "Blue Light" in which hearty nocturnal blooms in a stout vase are seen against a starry sky, seemly trumpeting their vespertine glories from their shapely horns. By contrast, in "Red Ocher Vase,: small colorful flowers on a tall vine, rising out of a vessel shaped like a human heart, appear to sizzle like  sparks on the fuse of a bomb.

Indeed it is this sense of imminence, of something strange  about to happen, and in happening, to create a metaphor for something else, that imbues the ostensibly simple paintings of Alphonse Lane with a vital complexity which transcends that connotations of passivity and morbidity inherent in The French term for still life, "nature morte."