Ronnie Landfield at Findlay Gallery

 Ronnie Landfield, Summer Passage, 60x65, 2024

By JONATHAN GOODMAN December 1, 2024

In a surprisingly large show of luminous, multicolored acrylic paintings, veteran painter Ronnie Landfield presented mostly mid-size compositions notable for their intense colors: luminous reds, bright greens, deep-set blues. Most taken up by the paintings look to a landscape a bit larger than life, given the unusual hues and the merging of these hues into an outlook, generally, of steady rising from grass to hills to mountains to sky.

The colors rival the colors used by the Fauves, an early 20th-century French painting movement that employed emphatically brilliant colors as well. At the same time, the Color Field movement, central to contemporary art in the 1960s in New York, offers even closer examples of art determined first and foremost by color. In Landfield’s work, one faces mystical planes of mostly horizontal stretches of hue.

This of course is a good way, via structure, to build a natural point of view, but the paintings create arrangements that can suggest abstract effects, largely because the horizontals are simple bars of color and suggest nothing other than themselves. The striking work called Being in Peace (2024) shows what looks like a flat, cake-like field of orange on the right, shored up on the left by expanses of dark terrains, including maroon, deep green, blue-black, and then moving into a patch of very dark bushes.This moves into a blue rise; backed by a blue meant to convey the darkened sky. It is a deeply romantic picture with apocalyptic tones.
 

Night of Time,48x41, 2024
 

In the marvelous, nearly photographic work Journey Through Time (2017), the middle part of the painting, in which a broad, jagged expanse of snow-covered rocks climbs into a blue sky. The precipices and flat expanses of stone are sculptural in their outcroppings, creating a truly vivid and memorable treatment of nature. Landfield, who has traveled a good deal, seems eager here to make his knowledge of ic fields and tall overhangs evident in a very beautiful manner. For a New York City artist, the notations of distant places are not only beautiful, but mysteriously attractive for those living in a concrete environment. As ever, a mystical blue sky covers the upper register of the painting.

Journey Through Time, 2017, 25x84

One has the sense that these small paintings are symbolic abstractions of inspired states of mind. The emblematic titles Landfield gives his work support his idea. One work done this year, consists of cigar-shaped horizontals, colored green and dark red; they are lit, for a moment, by small bits and pieces of bright foliage–stalks and leaves–illuminated by yellow. The central barrel-shaped pieces offer deep weighted purpose on the left, green to that form’s immediate right, and beneath the two primary forms, on the second row, there is a similar shape colored light blue. One of the things that comes up in this body of work is the closeness of one form to the next. Still, gaps, shifts in space, are intensified by the range of colors Landfield uses. We must remember, too that the work is mystically oriented, and that the paintings’ similarity may have to do with a single glorious perception. A visionary understanding of nature looks like the artist’s main theme.
 
As Landfields’s titles indicate, the paintings look to a point of beauty highly spiritual in is implications. At the same time, the high-mindedness is constrained to some extent by the artist’s willingness to simplify his forms, making them accessible to the audience.

The beauty of the colors is remarkable, being driven by contrast and the feeling that the hues are lit from within. When color matches outlook in intensity, something ethereal takes place. Landfield is too good a painter to relegate his art to art alone; his names for the works make it clear he wants his art to have another function–indeed, another world of being. Not so many artists have made the point that distance from a realistic tableau and luminous materials can organize something highly moving, but that is what has happened here. WM