Art: Black and blooms
Mary Warner's unquiet botanicals seem to hold dark secrets
By Victoria Dalkey -- Bee Art Correspondent

There's a push-pull quality to Mary Warner's recent paintings of flowers on black velvet at the JayJay gallery. The oversized blooms alternately push into your space and suck you into theirs. Painted on shaped canvases, some convex and others concave, they seduce and repel, warn you off and enfold you in their arms.

"Tropic," a pair of exotic white orchids on a concave canvas, is a little like Cinerama on a small scale. The gigantic blooms wrap around you, inviting you into their space with the lusciousness of their rendering. Every reticulation of the frilly flowers, every vein in the translucent petals, all the colors that make up white entice you with their sensual pleasures. And yet, like all of Warner's blossoms, they are so intensely seen as to be almost frightening in their hyper-reality.

"Bloom," a red plant with dense, tightly wound flowers that unfurl at the edges of their bracts, comes out at you like an explosion of blood-red jewels. Intruding into your space from their convex canvas, the meticulously painted blossoms seem almost three-dimensional. Up close, the curled flowers resemble pods, seeds or kernels packed with an aggressive life force.

"Grab," a concave painting of a green chrysanthemum, does just that. The menacing tendrils of the strange blossom suck you into the painting, leaving you feeling that, like a man-eating plant, it might eat you. The acid green of the chrysanthemum's petals are uningratiating, glowing like some fluorescent life form against the black velvet. As you approach the painting, it overwhelms you with its menacing force, entangling you in its madness and the almost vicious application of paint.

There's something dark and morbid, almost funereal, about "Pressed," a trio of pink roses on a canvas that curves outward. Looked at up close, the pink petals, with their secretive folds, become fleshy, like the inner recesses of the body. The pink breaks down into tones ranging from deep red to violet blues and silver grays. What at first seems a dark, passionate, romantic image is tinged with the odor of death.

In these complex and confrontational images, Warner subverts our expectations of flower paintings or botanicals, which in the past have been associated with gentility, delicacy and frivolity. In her hands, they become major statements about the dark side of beauty and the fierceness of life. They also play with the ironies implicit in painting on black velvet, almost but not quite rescuing the material from its Vegas-Elvis-Liberace tawdriness.

Warner also shows a painting in oil and graphite of blowsy cabbage roses in a vase with the puckish title "Fat Heads." There's something flatfooted about the handling of the image, with its vase barely limned in and the roses quickly rendered in an almost illustrational way. But it's saved by the luminosity of the pale, pink ground on which she has placed the image.