Art Review: Nature in all its dramatic glory comes to light through pigment

John Torian, "Evening Song"

John Torina's career seems to have been an extended exploration into the nuances of painting light. As his exhibition "In the Gloaming," at David Lusk Gallery through May 28, reveals, his proficiency has attained near-mystical levels. There is a reception tonight at the gallery from 6 to 8 p.m.

These oil-on-canvas works, varying in scale from intimate to epic, delve into the moody recesses of twilight and dusk as the sinking or quiescent sun tints graying clouds with flame-like banners of blue, yellow and red or, dimmer still, with the crepuscular trappings of early darkness.

Torina has studied hard, both outdoors in observation and in the history of art, and one cannot help seeing how much he has learned from such Dutch masters of landscape and sky as van Ruisdael and Cuyp or from French artist Camille Corot or from an American painting of the gentle sublime like Ralph Blakelock.

Torina's intention and process mitigate against the ethereal; there's nothing of Tiepolo's lively, delicate empyrean here. Rather, he inhabits the realm of landscape and sky lent weight and substance by the action of pigment, the intensity of vision and the evocative depths of shadow.

While several of the pieces in the show, such as the monumental "Flying Dream" or the slightly smaller "Wind Swept," convey a sense of contemplation and meditation, mainly Torina offers a sense of volition and drama that seems new to his work.

In "River Roads #6," for example, a brilliant yellow smudge of sun dips behind a far horizon of trees, letting loose a blaze of vivid red that fades, higher in the sky, into scattered mottling of diminished orange, gray, blue and green; one slender tree stands sentinel in the mid-ground. In "Path of the Sun," at 60 by 72 inches the largest piece in the exhibition, the entire sky ignites in a theatrical display of cloudy sunset pyrotechnics, while below, on the darkening countryside, a river curves past banks of obscure trees into a brief encounter with a golden reflection of the golden sky.

These are works that strive for the sublime in the old sense, of a depiction of nature that overwhelms and enhances the human spirit with a force that reveals the natural world in all its awesome glory and transcendental possibility. This is the American vision of the Hudson River School or the 19th century artists who traveled to the then-unfamiliar West and painted the Rocky Mountains and the deep gorges of Yellowstone and Yosemite in shades of grandeur and manifest destiny.

No, Torina's intent seems both more modest and more realistic. As he told The Commercial Appeal in an interview in 2004, "I'm a diligent purist. I don't touch the painting when I bring it in, and I never work from photographs." In other words, the artist works outside, in nature, and he takes seriously his direct participation in the landscape he is painting. These are not the exalted and imposing landscapes of the American West, but the flat, almost nondescript geography of West Tennessee and North Mississippi, maps that in his hands deserve close looking and reverence.

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John Torina, "In the Gloaming"

At David Lusk Gallery, 4540 Poplar in Laurelwood, through May 28. Reception tonight, 6 to 8 p.m. Call 767-3800.

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