TOP 10 NEW YORK GALLERY EXHIBITIONS CAUGHT IN THE COVID-19 SHUTDOWN

David Ebony 

May 20, 2020

Ron Milewicz at Elizabeth Harris Gallery.

While humanity suffers in its struggle with the deadly Coronavirus, other aspects of the Earth’s natural environment, by all accounts, is at present enjoying something of a revival. The recent global shutdown of many factories and other businesses that pollute the planet, not to mention a dramatic reduction of automobile traffic’s toxins, have apparently resulted in cleaner air and water, healthier vegetation, and livelier wildlife. From this perspective, Ron Milewicz’s recent paintings of radiant landscapes of glistening fields, trees and wild shrubs, seem at once prescient, timely and timeless, suggesting an urgent homage to Nature. 

Known for his refined and imaginative cityscapes, Milewicz in recent years has spent part of his time in rural upstate New York. There, he is able to connect surrounding nature to an interior vision with a similarly heightened imagination–in terms of expressive line, color and composition–evident in his urban scenes. This exhibition’s title, Axis Mundi, refers to the earth’s axis, or the symbolic place where heaven and earth meet. The small scale of these oil paintings can hardly contain Milewicz’s cosmic vision. 

Down the Meadow shows an undulating field punctuated with rows of sinewy trees and bushes. Aglow with an ethereal incandescence, the image recalls one of Charles Burchfield’s hallucinatory watercolors. Milewicz’s vision, however, seems to me even more arcane, and corresponds on some level to the work of 19th-century British Romantics like Samuel Palmer, whose images, such as the hushed landscape of The Herdsman’s Cottage, or Sunset (1850), convey a powerful sense of awe and wonder in nature’s presence. Similarly transcendent, Milewicz’s nocturnal landscape, Pink Moon, shows a tree with bare limbs gracefully stretching heavenward, intertwined with a network of intensely glowing moonbeams.