Into the real

New exhibits show nature's way

by Christopher Millis

Like early Christians in the days of pagan Rome, realist painters, holding tight to such heresies as perspective and technique, have had to practice their art in a critical and popular underground for the past decades. The news for '98 is not only that they're back, but they're explosive, having grown kinky in their aesthetic caves. All that devotion to representing nature now puts the realists in a most peculiar avant-garde, since nature itself has turned diabolically strange.

The big show to watch out for this year happens in March at Gallery Naga (67 Newbury) when Paul Rahilly shows the watercolors he did last year in Ireland. Rahilly is as near as we get to a national treasure -- his ferociously sympathetic portraits of Bostonians, as revealing as they are edgy and formal, span a career of six decades and make him something of our era's own John Singer Sargeant. With some luck, the gallery will give over both rooms to Rahilly's delicate yet tumultuous evocations of the Irish countryside: they read like Job having an argument with the sky.

The truly outrageous always have impeccable manners: they have to. Without them comes even more frequent opprobrium. In that vein, painter/illustrator David Sullivan combines virtuoso technique with a renegade spirit. His is the other major event on the horizon for the new year. In May, Sullivan will mount an exhibit of paintings and drawings, some of them intricately nuanced graphite translations of oils by Cezanne, which he'll place on mechanized timers so that the frames periodically turn upside down. Sullivan, who shows at the Genovese/Sullivan Gallery, 47 Thayer Street, in the South End, may be our last great modernist.

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In February, the same gallery hosts what promises to be one of the important millennial group shows. "Humanoid" showcases a dozen emerging New York painters and sculptors who are creating provocative work based on the human form in media ranging from computer-generated images to papier mâché and stone. The way will be paved for the humanoids later this month when 70-year-old David Omar White sees his first solo exhibit of work that looks like a marriage of Georges Seurat with Inuit masks: eerie, folk pointillism.

No less uncanny than White's mandala-like visages -- and no less idiosyncratic in their own notions of what's real -- are the two artists whom Howard Yezerski (11 Newbury) will exhibit in January. The painter Robert Colescott, last year's American representative at the Venice Bienale, is something of a button-pushing legend. He substitutes African American faces for Caucasian ones in works such as "George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware." Colescott will be paired with a photographer who is equally hard-hitting, Dana Salvo, whose focus has moved from home altars to a series of images based on first communions in Gloucester. Retro-real.

February and March at the Howard Yezerski Gallery also promise major realist events. Groundhog Day will see the installation of John Coplans's disturbing, sensual oversized black and white self portraits. Coplans will appear along with the seminal photographs of Aaron Siskind, who died in 1991 and is known for making photography compatible with the dictates of abstract expressionism. The following month, Yezerski shows the landscapes of Emily Eveleth and the airbrush drawings of Sherry Kerlin, which the gallery describes as looking like incredibly detailed, but twisted, Victorian illustrations.

While the Museum of Fine Arts pursues its version of realism with its "Images of Fashion" show opening on January 27, other places are up to some exciting stuff. On January 31 "Mathew Brady's Portraits: Images as History" opens at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, and it promises to be dazzling. The first modern exhibition of Brady's opus, the show will include his portraiture as well as his monumental Civil War photographs.

Coming to the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover on April 24 through July 14 is the traveling exhibit of the works of Arthur Dove, a spellbinding retrospective that comprises approximately 80 paintings from 48 public and private collections by one of the United States' foremost modernists. At the other end of the spectrum, the Gardner Museum hosts "Titian and Rubens: Power, Politics, and Style," beginning on January 23 and continuing through April 26. The show, which brings together five thematically related paintings by the two European masters, compensates in its grandeur for what it may be lacking in its scope, a sign of curatorial realism.