A new gallery, Jarvis Art, has opened in Chinatown with an elegant exhibition of paintings connected by the theme of landscape. The show brings together twenty works by seventeen artists whose names, on the gallery’s spare website, are listed alphabetically in understated white type on a black rectangle. In its simple straight forward presentation, this listing format echoes the direct and easy way the paintings are presented. Without much fuss, the show, titled Ghost, teases out a modern idea of landscape painting that relies on expressive gestural mark making to evoke the movement of light through the quakings of nature, or even the stillness of structures. It also evokes a fresh idea that the known landscape is subject to precarity as we continue to lumber deeper into climate crises and slouch deeper into a way of seeing that is reliant on screens—the TV-sized ones that decorate our living rooms with preloaded overhead photos of far-away places, photographed from drones. Or the screens that we carry in our hands, on which we quickly look at paintings with which we will never even share the same room.

        The one artist who is represented by more than a single work is John Maclean, a London-based Scottish artist from whom we see four small watercolors. These are the most plainly landscape of all the works in the show. Each is a dreamy little snapshot of clearings and flora, composed of dots and dashes, rich in color and movement. Gold Birch, a depiction of a path through an allée of birches, with its vibrant ochres obscuring an aqua blue sky, feels apropos to the unseasonably cool end of summer in the city. Another untitled one of these is especially notable for its nearly psychedelic use of velvety earth and jewel tones creating a picture where time of day and distinction between near and far are blurred. They can be seen to evoke use of an Instagram filter without abandon, but the artist’s choices are deliberate, specific, and controlled.

        A contrast to these, in both size and representation, is one of the largest works in the show, Daniel Licht’s Liar. It is comprised of four adjoined panels, painted with oil and wax, pigmented by the artist with natural minerals. The colors are chalkboard green, rusty browns, and yellowy whites, which feel like they are laid on like frosting, pushed and pulled into areas that became delicate skims or gritty impastos. The artist employs a technique that reminds me of Joan Mitchell—letting the four panels have marks that transgress the edge of one panel and continue onto the next, while also having marks that stop abruptly at a particular panel’s edge. This brings the viewer into the process of art making in an exciting way, letting someone imagine the sequence in which the artist made his movements. It says something about the way we construct a panorama in our mind, seeing a broad landscape broken down into adjoining sections. It also addresses how our memory works—how the way we might remember one moment does not always perfectly align with the way we remember the next.

        Max Ruf supplied a particularly engaging and enigmatic oil on canvas. Untitled (phthalo green lines, connected, white over black, red and green) is exactly what the title says it is. I looked and then re-looked at this picture multiple times. I wonder if I did not see it in the context of “‘landscape,” if I would have seen it as an overhead image of a racetrack or a digital-moiré reproduction of a guide one might pick up when visiting a historic home and its surrounding gardens. But if I get my mind to tilt the picture up to vertical, and see it not as a flat representation of something else, if I just let it be on the wall in front of me, the composition becomes stacks, cantilevers, floaters, and a bouncy swirl which all play with gravity in a way that is a bit delightful.

        In a somewhat similar way, Variations in Time, a 1964 canvas by Forrest Bess, took a little adjustment of expectation to see as landscape. I think of Bess as a painter of symbols, essentially interested in the flatness of the canvas. Looking at this small painting however, I could recall driving through the barrenness of western Texas, through monochromatic fields of yellow grasses punctuated by the occasional hill on the generally flat horizon. By including this painting in this room of landscapes, the gallery has introduced me to an unexpected way, of looking at Bess’s collection of rhythmic, mostly vertical, marks of deep mustard, seemingly scraped out of the eerie masking tape-yellow field of short brush marks.

        One last little gem in this show, Garden Within, is a 2002-09 painting by Joan Snyder. Although her paintings over the decades of her career have varied greatly in style, this work is not like anything I have seen before. It is nearly two paintings in one. There is the 18 x18 inch square panel that is the ground of the painting, and which contains a smaller panel that is centered from left to right, but from top to bottom, is slightly lower than center. The center panel is mostly rich leafy acid greens, flecked with yellow, and occasionally blotched with murky white. The tiny green rectangle is interrupted by bursts of visceral pink, nearly rose-like, clumps. The larger panel is a ground of pale pinks and yellows playing with white, through which swirling ribbons of pink appear to dance. Through these ribbons, scribbles of barely-there green pencil marks snake about. This small painting almost looks ceramic and epitomizes the jolie-laide. It feels intimate and pretty and personal.

        In a sense, every landscape is personal. A landscape is of course a depiction of a given place at a given time. But more than that, it is a vulnerable display of how an artist sees, how they process a vision, what their hand is capable of conveying—all in an effort to depict something that anyone might see for themselves. In this show especially, each painting, more than telling a story, reveals a mood or a moment, that we must assume, because it warranted memorialization; it is imbued with a meaning, of which we may never know the origin, but with which we may empathize through the art’s energy and/or urgency. Further, the paintings in this show all energize each other. Together they successfully conjure the joy of looking at art and the importance of stepping back, turning off the screens, and looking at the world.

Paul Moreno is an artist, designer, and writer working in Brooklyn, New York. He is a founder and organizer of the New York Queer Zine Fair. His work can be found on Instagram @bathedinaftherthought. He is the New York City editor for the New Art Examiner.