SANTA BARBARA NEWS-PRESS

ART REVIEW : Going to the beaches

NYC-based painter Warren Holt at Gallery Ocho

By Josef Woodard, NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT

June 27, 2008 7:18 AM

Warren Holt, 'Playascope'

When: through July 10

Where: Gallery Ocho, 1221 #8 State St.

Hours: noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday

Information: 965-3054, www.galleryocho.com

The gallery leaves the scene on a semi-summery note, with Holt's artfully re-imagined, scruffed-up and diversely treated beach scenes from around the world -- from China to New York City to Santa Barbara. He eschews a narrowly defined painterly approach, shifting from degrees of realism and abstraction, from standard compositional strategies to elliptical trickery, staying loose and inventive on the subject of beach life -- and beach goers.

Southern California tends to go to the beach, mentally and culturally, around this time of year, and Holt is both with and against type in his beach scenery. The artist is not simply castigating the stereotypical fun-in-the-sun aloofness of the SoCal archetype, although some of that attitude comes through. Yes, he created these paintings in the dead of Gotham winter, from photographs and odd sources, but one gets the sense that the artist is interested in digging in and around the realities and the culture of life at the beach.

His interest is usually keyed into the relationship of humans and nature. Figures figure strongly in most of the paintings here, even if they can fade into the role of compositional props. In "Wading in the Tide," a mother and child appear in a soft-focused, mirage-like vision, whereas the crisper and more nervous-edged stylization in "Mountains and Sea (Greece)" injects more angst-driven energy, even though we can't put our finger on the source of tension. Such is the power of color and expressive suggestion.

Ironic contrasts of milieu becomes the centerpiece -- and the joke -- in "City and Sand (Long Island Beach)," with a fenced-in beach area within view of the Hudson River and yonder New York City skyline. On the more abstract side of the spectrum, Holt moves into purer optical sensuality with "Pink Abstraction" and "White Light," in which the luminous source in the middle glows with mystery and heat.

And then we're off to China, for "Under the Umbrella," a kind of super-realist image of beachgoers from a global place we don't normally associate with beach culture. Then again, that's our stereotype factory at work. Southern California hardly has the corner on the beach market. Holt understands that fact, which turns out to be one of the undercurrents in his exhibition. It's a pleasant, worldly and varied affair, but with a specific point of departure -- if not specific point of view.