By: Mark Jenkins
ATTERNING LINKS SOME, BUT CERTAINLY NOT ALL, of the pieces in "Art Matters," a holiday group show at Gallery Neptune & Brown. Predominantly prints, the selection includes several pieces that are simultaneously austere and sensuous: a Linn Meyers etching of a rumpled field of dots, mostly black but with three rows of gold; a Sean Scully aquatint of overlapping, soft-edged bars of black, gray, and blue; two Paul Inglis woodblocks in which regular grids are disordered by sudden shifts of color; Erick Johnson's painting of 12 eccentric hexagons striated with multiple hues; and a David X Levine colored-pencil drawing that reduces a chapel to elementary shapes, mostly in shades of blue.
The other largest subgroup consist of depictions of nature, often painted. Among these Stephen Estrada's realistic picture of violent surf; Stone Roberts's exquisitely detailed etching of three pears; Carol Barsha's more fanciful painting-drawing of a pink-splashed garden; and Foon Sham's wooden sculpture, a chasm nestled within but its outer surface the color of water. Somewhere between the first group and the second is Janis Goodman's "Morning Paddle," a study of aqueous green shapes that could be either water or clouds. Its near-abstract forms suggest that all pattern-making begins with observation of nature.