The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Neil Jenney: North America

The Aldrich exhibition features eight Good paintings that Jenney completed since 2004 (his works can take as long as five years to finish). These new works project a haunting, elegiac beauty. In the two largest, both called North America Divided, the wide, deep frames enclose narrow, horizontal vistas measuring about 8 inches by 8 feet. As though seeing through the slotted window of a military bunker, we behold sections of tree trunks whose textures are rendered with a sensuous painterly touch against heavenly skies that seem as though lit from within. In one, part of a rusty barbed-wire fence extends across the lower edge, giving the text printed in a 19th-century style font on the frame - N Divided A - an allegorical edge.