XL REVIEWS
Owen McAuley 

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Thursday, March 22, 2007

'Owen McAuley is on to something. And that's abundantly clear with his captivating new paintings and drawings at D Berman Gallery.

While a graduate student at the University of Texas a few years ago, McAuley impressed with his elusive yet highly stylized nocturnal paintings of quotidian unpopulated mid-American urban scenes: parking lots, strip malls, etc.

Since moving to New York — where he works as an assistant to that 1980s icon and maker of elusive art, Robert Longo — McAuley has used a new source for his subject: randomly found Web cam images. McAuley is particularly fond of weather cams and security cams, and as he did before, he selects the most mundane locales.

There's some wonderfully sly commentary within McAuley's method of taking low-res digital images from the Internet and transforming them into high-res scenarios through that most old school of art mediums: oil paint.

But beyond that clever metamorphosis, McAuley continues to compel as he has before, again using the mysteries of nighttime — especially the way artificial light transforms the everyday place — to invite all kinds of speculation about what's really going on in his exquisitely rendered contemporary landscapes.

It's not easy to tell. Take the drawing "McKinney, Texas" with its shadowy parking lot foregrounded with a huge satellite receiver. Is it a benign or dangerous place?

It's rewarding to imagine it either way.

("Owen McAuley: New Work" continues 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday through April 7 at D Berman Gallery, 1701 Guadalupe St. Free. 477-8877, www.dbermangallery.com.)

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