From The Studio

By Rose C. S. Slivka

The spring season in New York is considerably the brighter for the recently opened shows of the East End painters Gerson Leiber at Denise Bibro and Robert Dash at A.C.A. galleries.

While both artists take inspiration from the same source - the garden - each brings his own original focus to the subject. Each transforms and reinterprets the visual meaning of the garden in such individual and unique ways that the artists and their resulting works bear as little relationship to each other as they do to our customary visual expectations of gardens.

While Mr. Leiber calls his new oils on canvas "My Garden" and is clearly informed and formed by the experience of creating his own garden in Springs, well-known as a work of art in process for the last 45 years, he is also deeply affected, as he has said, by the gardens he has visited throughout the world (his favorite being Versailles in France) as well as by those in his own exotic and obsessive fantasies.

A Somber Palette

Mr. Leiber's gardens become surreal ground, the medium for his search and voyage into form - disciplined definitions of space framed by hedges and trellises in cubist and geometric shapes. Their architecture - spare, pure, and chilling - is a container for the somberness of color, deeply musical with blacks, grays, and greens as in "The Lightless Garden," cemetery-like in its austere, formal, and dark ambience. Even in the colorful "Buoyant Hedges," black predominates over the pitch of mauves, lavenders, browns, yellows, blues.

Ultimately abstract, the spirit of these gardens is beyond nature. Here, nature pays its tribute to art. In a garden where the artist and the gardener are one and the same, the real subject is the visual concert between the movements of life and the immobilities of death.

His handling of his medium and tools - oil pigment and the brush - is deft, skilled, yet profoundly felt out as a consummate act of art. The gravity of the emotional weight in this new series contrasts to the humor and irony in his work of a few years ago when he was painting the figure, a classic subject in the history of art, made idiosyncratic as only Mr. Leiber can do. He painted women posing in Victoria's Secret lingerie and portraits of imaginary women with long cigarette holders.

Sexual Metaphor

Robert Dash, on the other hand, known for his wonderful garden, Madoo, in Sagaponack and for his landscapes, now brings out the animal in blooms and buds. His portrayal of flowers is organic and meaty with sexual undertones, a kind of gay version of Georgia O'Keeffe's vaginal botanical renditions.

Called "Florilegium," the exhibit reveals the artist's continuous probings of flora as a sexual metaphor for the body's orifices, knobs, and nubs, certainly the next place to study and paint after his Guild Hall show of a couple of years ago in which penile forms had their day in the garden.

Here again, nature pays its tribute to art. These are flowers invented by Mr. Dash first for the painting and second for his imaginary garden. On the other hand, if anyone can give them real roots in Madoo, this gardener can and does. These oil on canvas paintings, each depicting a single floral form with pistils and stamen-like little teeth on the edge of a crater, or hammers limp and hanging, are larger than life at almost six feet square.

Overwhelming in sexual presence - hungry, seductive, irresistable - they are gripping, contagious in their energy, so vivid in every way they seem redolent with body aromas, especially the armpit and groin fragrances, in dramatic contrast to the ascetic, clean, essentialized lyricism of Mr. Leiber's funereally formal gardens.

Both exhibits conclude May 5.