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Amid all the gaudy clamor of the contemporary art scene, the Polish-born painter Aleksandra Nowak, whose recent oils on canvas and board are on view at CFM Gallery, 236 West 27th Street, May 2010, is that rare discovery: an artist who still appears haunted, even wounded, by mortal beauty. Although Nowak’s most constant subject is the human fi gure, she invests even her occasional landscapes and fl oral studies with an underlying sense of the dichotomy of life and death, of ripeness and imminent decay, that some might call morbid or decadent. And there is no denying that a lushness verging on decadence informs her oil “Roses I,” with its echoes of the Viennese Succession in the fleshy pink blooms and tendril-like stems that the artist caresses almost erotically with her brush. The same holds true for Nowak’s “Hope,” a serenely dreamlike pastoral landscape, in which the rhythms of the trees mirror those of the billowing clouds, and the sun-dappled foliage camouflages and all but consumes the small rustic dwelling near the center of the composition with its flickering chiaroscuro. In this sublime bucolic salad of a picture, Nowak appears to do nothing short of reconciling the diametrically opposed aesthetics of Impressionism and Symbolism by virtueof imbuing a scientifically scrupulous transcription of light and shadow with a dimension of the intangible. This sense of the numinous in the guise of everyday reality is no less present in Nowak’s human subjects, which, while they may technically belong to the genre of portraiture –– being posed images of particular individuals rendered realistically –– are much more than portraits in any ordinary definition of the term.

Granted, her skill in capturing the tones and textures of specific fabrics in clothing or background furnishings and evoking a particular milieu with bravura flourishes of the brush can often remind one of Sargent’s society portraits. However, Nowak is never obliged to practice flattery in the service of vanity, since she employs her models as actors in private dramas of her own
creation.

Indeed, they invariably resemble characters from plays by Ibsen or Strindberg, not only for the period quality of their costumes, but for the dramatic resonance of their poses. For Nowak possesses the ability, especially rare among figurative painters today, to convey complex emotions through subtle gestures and expressions, as seen in her oil on canvas “Claire in Summer Dress.” Here, the defiant tilt of the dark-haired young woman’s strong chin, her aquiline nose, her narrowed eyes, the smudge of rouge on her pale cheek, and the set of sensual lips suggest a tempestuous nature held momentarily in check. By contrast, the evasively unfocused eyes and impenetrable pout of the prepubescent girl in “Promise” (who looks as though she wishes to retreat behind her radiant curtains of hair) reveal less about her feelings than do her boyishly oversized hands, joined selfconsciously in front of her lower body.

Women are the emotional protagonists of Nowak’s paintings, while her male characters –– such as the boy sporting a derby and dreamily touching one finger to his temple in a summer garden in “Sunday Morning I” and the only slightly more mature fellow seated on a stool and sporting an absurdly showy waxed mustache in “Man, Fin De Siecle” –– appear to be aloof dreamers, driven by grandiose schemes and ambitions outside the domestic realm, wherein the true drama resides.

While in previous exhibitions many of Nowak’s most memorable pictures centered on the figure of the ingenue or the youthful femme fatale, the older, wiser female figure puts in an appearance in more than one of her most recent visual dramas. Not only does the artist intrepidly buck the trend, so endemic to contemporary culture, of seducing the viewer with the sensuality of youth; she just as daringly presents the mature subjects of both “Fortune Teller” and “Doll Maker” in profile, foregoing even the psychological connection that full frontal eye-contact with the viewer automatically affords.

Yet, even with the lower half of her face hidden by her hand, as if by an outlaw’s mask, “Fortune Teller” mesmerizes one with the witch-like power of a knowingglance askance. And the noble brow, high cheekbones, and prominent nose of “Doll Maker,” posed like a voo doo crone with some of her progeny visible on a shelf in the background, synthesizes the facial characteristics of two formidable woman artists: the painter Georgia O’Keeffe and the photographer Annie Leibovitz. As if to confi rm this writer’s conviction that there truly is an underlying narrative in which all of Nowak’s characters participate –– as well as to suggest, perhaps, the symbolic role of the artist as manipulating deity –– effigies resembling those on the shelf behind the doll maker take center stage in Nowak’s oil “Night Watch.” Ostensibly, this could be a simple picture of dolls clustered together on a sofa in a darkened livingroom. But as with all of Nowak’s paintings, it suggests more than meets the eye. The most prominent doll, the one in the frilly dress with ribbons in her hair, could suggest some descendent of the dwarfi sh little girl in Rembrandt’s famous masterpiece of the same name. For while the clown doll behind her and the stuffed animal at her feet appear to be asleep, her vigilance suggests that she may at any second rouse the others and lead them in some magical procession like “The Dance of the Wooden Soldiers” –– or indeed, the military procession in Rembrandt’s picture! “Night Watch,” like another oil entitled “The Masquerade,” depicting an array of clowns and other carnivalesque figures dissolving in luminous oil glazes, suggests a possible departure for this talented artist.

Could it be that under the auspices of CFM gallery director Neil Zukerman, who continues in his new Chelsea location the tradition he established over several years in Soho of featuring the very best contemporary exemplars of Surrealist and Symbolist inspired art, the paintings of Aleksandra Nowak aretaking a turn for the phantasmagorical?