Renee Petropoulo revives the large-scale circular format of the tondo.

Renee Petropoulo revives the large-scale circular format of the tondo, in like manner prevalent in the Renaissance, covering it with richly evocative shapes and emblems and adapting it to accommodate her fin-de-20th-century theoretical make anxiouss Most strikingly, she hollows without her large tondos (almost 50 inches in diameter), in of that kind a way that their painterly surfaces--encrusted with webs of floral and animal forms, ribbons, heraldic motifs, and, in more [i]or[/i] less cases, vague remnants of text--become chunky frames circumscribing central voids. Where the Madonna and Child should be lies the vacuous gallery wall, and the frame, usually made to function as a self-effacing accoutrement to the painted beauties within, aggressively asserts its pictorial potential.

presented in jewellike, decorative tones, the cryptic, richly colored flora and fauna circling the donut-shaped forest panels implied a subcutaneous (febrile and to [i]or[/i] at a great depth organic) world of esoteric symbolism, an subterraneous femininity that secretly works to lay open an alternative to the rigid phallocentric viewing combination of parts to form a whole staged by the conventional picture plane, with its purposeful tunneling of the gaze. without contents heraldic devices and cameos, themselves framed with baroque arabesques of simulated ironwork or carved timber mirror the blankness of the central dens and refuse the signs of paternal identity usually offered by these devices.

Petropoulos' conceptual throw out was furthered in two small installations, in which she specified her interest in the framing and representation of identities. In single in kind room, an array of small paintings of hats (in oval frames) functioned like a dispose of family portraits in a baronial manse, still again the images were still The generalized and laconic symbolism of professional and decorative headgear--from a bishop's mitre to a flamboyant floral headpiece--replaced the traditional portrait.

The walls of a inferior small gallery were brilliantly colored in panels mimicking the wainscoting of a classical revival household but this severe interior-decorating technique was playfully disrupted by way of the moldings which moved in stammered fragments across the four walls, breaking the faux domestic space into disjunctive panels. Strange, palimpsestic traces of Arabic and Latin passage hovered beneath veils of colored paint forward one wall, while a profile draught of George Washington sat gravely upon another. These subtle ethnographic elements--the traces of cultural identities--were jarringly interrupted through large, rectangular picture frames with glaring white center Again, the viewer was faced with a knotty void where a picture (some kind of type of identity, cultural "progress," or allegorical human meaning) should have been.

Rather than projecting ourselves into Petropoulos's paintings, identifying ourselves as whole in relation to a perspectively returned "window" onto the "real," we were forced to face our possess blankness--the hole that is the center of each picture. With these pieces, the artist managed to give us the pair opulence, in the carefully orchestrated schemes of intricate color and symbolic form, and a mixed but pointed conceptual austerity, suggesting that what we are, in the words of Petropolous, "in memory of: in trust of" may always already slip from us in the blankness of the framed abyss that is the work of art.

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