Real New

The largest and most important of the battlefield paintings is "Summit Springs Battleground: Dog Soldiers' Last Stand," an oil on canvas depicting a present-day view of the now-bucolic landscape that was the site of an Indian massacre. The landscape has been fleshed out with a quick gestural stroke. Although the paint has been thinned out, the approach is painterly, and scumbled passages, in which various tones are blended and juxtaposed, are used in the hills and rocks, and especially in the sky. The modulated blues that make up the sky are accented by white and black writing that stands in for the non-existent clouds.

The three "painter" paintings are completely different. Whereas the battlefield scenes are loosely painted with coats of translucent pigment, resulting in an atmospheric quality corresponding to the exterior world itself, the painter paintings are done with thick pigments in small repeated strokes. The perspective has been shortened, creating an awkward spatial relationship in the compositions. It's almost as though McElhinney is creating the unseen painting in his painting. The setting is France, and it's possible that McElhinney is using this awkward approach to three-dimensional imagery -- the figure of the painter, for instance, is positively wooden -- to refer back, if only ironically, to classic French salon painting from before the rise of impressionism.

In the more intimate spaces under the mezzanine of the gallery are the small, easel-sized hyperrealist paintings by Rick Dula, who moved here from Oakland just last year. Dula's paintings concern the urban environment, and most are set in his former stamping grounds on the West Coast. There is at least one Denver landmark among the paintings, however: "Factory," an acrylic on board, is a perfectly executed view of the Gates Rubber Company plant on South Broadway.

Upstairs on the mezzanine are more than a dozen landscapes, both paintings and strange dioramas, by Texas artist Lloyd Brown. All are very conservative in style -- virtually impressionistic --but since they're just this side of neo-traditionalism, they're worth seeing.

Yet another representational style is being illustrated at Ron Judish Fine Arts, where Francis Johansen: New Works is being shown in the gallery just beyond the entry space.

Johansen moved to Denver in the late 1990s from Minneapolis, where he graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1993. He first exhibited at the CORE artists' cooperative, but was soon picked up by Judish, which has exhibited his work since 1999. His pieces involve the depiction of buildings in monumental, meticulously rendered charcoal drawings. In spite of the fact that the charcoal is faintly applied, as are the colored shades, there's a remarkable sense of verisimilitude, and the drawings are strikingly detailed and realistic. Well, sort of, given that he's concerned with creating a surrealistic world.

Several concern charming Victorian houses, including "The Thin Path" and "One More Time," which loom like transparent apparitions in the distance; Johansen uses this effect in all of these charcoal and mixed-media drawings.

In some he has painted ghostly double images so that one apparition appears to be in front of the other. This is seen in "Horizon," in which two figures sit on a porch that's superimposed onto the facade of another building. Even more elaborate and intriguing is "Untitled," the most breathtaking Johansen in the show. In it, a frontier-town street is combined with a looping railroad trestle; it could all be set in Georgetown. The piece is the largest and most colorful one in the show, with areas of green and orange subtly arrayed across its nearly four-by-six-foot paper surface.

The shows at Judish and Havu, as well as the ones at Robischon, all come down on June 1. Together, these four exhibits offer gallery-goers the chance to view an ad hoc "blockbuster" exploring contemporary takes on the physical environment.

And since all four are clearly part of the representational trend seen all season, they are essential viewing, no matter what.

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The Johansen show is just one of a quartet of exhibits at Judish, and although the other three don't contain contemporary representational paintings or drawings, they are still notable.

In the gallery parallel to the Johansen show is Ron Katz-Carnevale Di Venezia. For his color Fuji crystal archival prints, Katz has taken candid close-ups of the masked revelers at Carnevale in Venice, which is a 1,000-year-old-plus version of Mardi Gras (in Italian, it's called Martedì Grosso). The photos have a documentary quality, but the outrageous and sumptuous outfits people are wearing make the photos look otherworldly.

The second solo is Christopher James: Photographs, which consists of images of the region that the artist has captured in sumptuous gelatin silver prints. In a sense, he's acting as a modern-day William Henry Jackson, memorializing the changes that are taking place -- though Jackson mostly recorded the city being built up, and James is fascinated by its coming down. For instance, the heartbreaking "Currigan" zeroes in on one of those incredible space-frame columns exposed during the recent demolition of Currigan Exhibition Hall. Also distinct from Jackson, James seems to be out shooting only after sundown.