Capsule Reviews

Evan Daniel Lintermans' Mountain Paintings Lintermans' space-age paintings of Mount McKinley augur a nimble and brainy future for the new gallery Road Agent. If small quantities are a mark of high quality, then this show receives high marks for good stuff. Six acrylic-on-Plexiglas paintings hang on the walls of Road Agent's subtle but extraordinarily well-designed gallery space. The shattered-glass cragginess of these paintings is the result of Lintermans' digital manipulation of photographs. Flying high above the Alaskan snow in his brother's plane, Lintermans makes photographs of jagged arctic mountaintops, downloads them onto his desktop, transforms them by color and sundry other digital maneuvers and finally projects and paints the images on the backside of Plexiglas surfaces. The mountains are mimetically legible, suggesting that the artist renders them in reverse. With the exception of the campy stained-glass abstraction of "Untitled (Blue Mountain)," each surface reads from left to right as a mountain. Lindermans defuses the rugged sublimity of Mount McKinley with color, using red, blue, black and white to transform the dangerous and natural into the benign and artificial. Bright color and plastic surfaces anoint Lintermans' "Red Mountain" with a well-balanced kitschiness--a beautiful artificiality on par with the symmetries of Barbie's abdominal region and the backside of her leg. As with Barbie's body parts, one is secretly wont to lick the surfaces. Through April 15 at Road Agent, 2909-A Canton St., 214-749-4049. (Charissa N. Terranova)

Francesco Patriarca's L'Appartement The young Italian photographer Francesco Patriarca captures the collective memory of space and objects combined. Accompanied by the lyrical catalog essay by Sibylle Pieyre de Mandiargues, "The Apartment," Patriarca's photographs distill the remembrance of things past without any of the soupy navel-gazing to which similar pictorial peregrinations often fall prey. Images such as "L'Appartement 5" and "L'Appartement 20" show the stained silhouettes of once-hung pictures on the wall as if so many disembodied fossils. Patriarca sheers nostalgia of its tearfulness by shooting it through a prism of pragmatism. That the images are mounted on aluminum not only makes them appear to float but also lends a deadpan, impassive feel. Through March 25 at Goss Gallery, 2500 Cedar Springs Road, 214-696-0555. Reviewed March 9. (C.T.)