The New York Times 

Art in Review

By GRACE GLUECK

Published: July 29, 2005


Peter Gregorio
Paintings

Eva Lee
New Drawings and Digital Animations

Kevin Van Aelst
Complex Confections

Real Art Ways
56 Arbor Street, Hartford
Gregorio and Lee through Sept. 11
Van Aelst through Aug. 15

Several shows are the rule at this multidisciplinary alternative space, founded in 1975, and presenting an extensive art exhibition program. Of its current four shows, one, photographs by Sarah Anne Johnson, appeared earlier this year at the Julie Saul Gallery in Manhattan. Among the remaining three, the freshest is ''Complex Confections,'' a show by another up-and-coming photographer, Kevin Van Aelst, who uses scientific and mathematical theory to make witty rearrangements of everyday stuffs, like crackers, donuts and sweater lint.

In Mr. Van Aelst's photographs the magic of fractal geometry, chaos theory and such is manifest in the drops spilling out from a carton of milk that fall in a beautiful logarithmic spiral; lint stuck to a sweater that produces an accurate star chart of the New England summer skies; and a fried egg, sunnyside up, that reproduces its yoke in a set of smaller ones that progressively diminish to the size of buttons. This work is about ''creating order where randomness is expected, defying natural probabilities,'' Mr. Van Aelst says. And he adds that his arrangements illustrate ''timeless and lofty ideas,'' like the Golden Mean. But that doesn't quite account for the fun of them.

Eva Lee shows works on paper and ''The Liminal Series,'' six short video animations. Her striking works on paper, biomorphic ovoid spaces shaped from deep black ground by thready white lines that pattern themselves into showy networks, suggest cellular and body structures, as well as the vast abstractions of the universe. In her video animations, swarms of white dots and dashes move constantly over a black ground, dissolving and rearranging themselves into complex patterns that suggest at once the awesome infinities and minutiae of the cosmos. Watching them can be hypnotic, but in the end they are too bound up with technical concepts to offer much visual nourishment.

Six big paintings by Peter Gregorio, based on his travels in Nepal and India, provide fragmentary glimpses of the complex architecture of these ancient civilizations, solid, heavily ornamented stonework that he shows in isolated elements, so that each painting becomes a sort of composite. As such, they have the rather interesting look of stage sets. Unfortunately, Mr. Gregorio has added a colored rectangle of paint to most of them that floats in the middle of the picture. Was the device intended to make a connection with the modern world? If so, it's superfluous.

GRACE GLUECK