A formal kinship between painter Timothy Wilson and cut-paper collagist Rebecca FitzPatrick unites otherwise discrete processes. Wilson's figurative oil paintings are gestural and phantasmagorically imprecise, like Old Master portraits tarnished ochre after decades in an attic. Painted with heavy brushstrokes, they conjure an era of power in glowering darkness while emptying the history of the portrait of its individual characters, leaving only timeless archetypes. In smaller scale, FitzPatrick's totemic, postmodern deities similarly erode her figures' histories with juxtaposed limbs and animal features.
Quoth Ovid: "By nature's study of the nobler arts, our nature's softened, and more gentle grows." Be that as it may, Rose's "Mythologies" — with its blasphemies, nakedness, violence, and inscrutabilities — lends the sentiment a welcome contemporary spin.
"Mythologies," mixed media group exhibition | through August 25 | Rose Contemporary, 492 Congress St, Portland | 207.780.0700 | rosecontemporary.com
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Museum And Gallery
, mythology, Rose Contemporary, myth, More 
, mythology, Rose Contemporary, myth, Stephen Burt, judith, Less 
