'A Traves de mis manos/Through My Hands'

'A Traves de mis manos/Through My Hands'

through Aug. 30

It's just a plate with a landscape painted on it, right? Sitting on a display stand, just a large, round white plate, in the center of which is a photorealistic representation of a jungle setting: dense, verdant foliage rising up on either side of a placid, winding stream. But wait, as your eye moves downward, following the water as it flows from background to foreground, you see it flowing right off the front of the plate and pooling on the tablecloth beneath it. Painter Esteban Machado Diaz has caught you, caught you in his trickster's twisting of reality.

In the solo exhibition "A Traves de mis manos/Through My Hands," the Cuban painter offers us a gallery of playfully impossible landscapes. Palm trees rise from a broken eggshell in a nest, as if newly hatched; grow off the decks of a shipwrecked galleon on a sandy beach; and sit in massive ceramic pots suspended over the sea, hanging from chains that are nailed to the sky. Jungle vegetation grows thick on a mountain floating in the sky and out of a metal window box attached to a brick wall and behind a pair of goldfish as large as the trees. Or are the trees as small as the goldfish? We can't be certain. The best we can say is that something we know to be one size is not the size we know it to be, just as what we know should be flat appears to be breaking from two dimensions into three. But wait, it's still two-dimensional since it's all a flat painting, right? Right?

Diaz's landscapes are reminiscent of the art of M. C. Escher in their blend of crisply naturalistic depictions and visual tricks that confuse our perception of reality. They provide us with a kind of reality, a natural world that we recognize and want to accept as ours, but they won't let us; they insist on reminding us that they're just paintings. Diaz hits us with this idea most directly in Y soy de un pobre pintor, a large, broad seascape in which our eye wants to rest, bobbing peacefully on the azure waves that stretch on and on to the horizon, but it's stopped at the surface by stitched cuts in the canvas and by the inclusion in the lower half of the image of the artist's hand, holding brushes and a paint-smeared palette.

In one sense, most of these images play off the same premise, that visual tension between the reality we live in and an equally vivid reality of the imagination. And you could say that once you get the premise, the rest of the work loses its attraction. But that wasn't true of Escher, and it isn't true here. Diaz paints for us unspoiled environments, lush primeval paradises where nature is free from humanity's destructive hand. As such, they are tempting getaways for the viewer, refuges from the concrete and exhaust on the other side of the gallery walls. But only rarely does Diaz allow us to escape, free and clear, into the hi-def Edens on his canvases. He uses that light surrealist touch to keep us mindful of the world we're in, the one created by the hand holding the brushes and the palette. It's as if he's forcing us to choose: Do you stand in the world of the plate or the world of the jungle? You can spend a long time swaying back and forth trying to decide.