It All Depends On Color and Texture

Judith Singelis has never before cleared her entire gallery to concentrate on a single artist. But when her new show at Argazzi Art, Raw Impressions, opens on Saturday, Aug. 29, the space will be devoted entirely to Victor Mirabelli's gorgeous paintings of lonely structures — houses, barns, even a hotel —  long abandoned in placid rural settings.

But don't expect realism from Mirabelli. His pictures combine gentle abstraction with an impressionistic sensibility. Everything depends on color and texture: Mirabelli applies oil pigment directly on the canvas, then brushes and scrubs successive layers into the canvas. From a distance his pictures look heavily textured with thick paint; up close they reveal how thin the paint actually is.

Mirabelli paints from memories of growing up in the dusty, arid land east of the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. Abandoned farmhouses and outbuildings, victims of hard economic times, stand forlornly beside roads where sagebrush grows. Sometimes fog and mist from the nearby Columbia River rise in early morning to envelop everything.

Mirabelli farmhouses and structures are always white with colored roofs. They are almost always two-story, and most are made of wings at strict angles to one another, as if the painter's memory included those little houses and hotels in a Monopoly game. Some are pierced with vertical windows, tall and narrow like the arrow slits in a medieval castle. Most stand behind a hazy, feathery foreground of fields usually painted in somber earth tones. But Mirabelli can surprise: Some structures lie behind  fields of blazing, summery yellow, or warm autumn gold. One, “Rural Fancy,” rests on gold-tinged green grass against an apple green sky.

“On Holiday” is different from other paintings in the show. The two-story building, topped by a square cupola, is white on its long side, gray on the front, which is angled right. Four windows line each floor, their awnings offering cooling protection from the summer sun. “Sweet Summer” hides much of its building behind a field of such intense yellow you can almost feel the sun. “Shades of Autumn” trades summer yellow for a grayed gold, like the color of fields at the end of the season as winter's desolation approaches.

Many of the pictures in Raw Impressions are large. “After the Rainfall,” five feet square, places a small, gray-roofed building against the suggestion of gray and dirty-white mountains in the distance. “Stylish Farmhouse,” also five-feet square, shows a large farmhouse, its extension jutting straight at us from between two horizontal wings, one with a single-story room and porch attached. The roofs are pale, smudged gray except for the surprise of sky blue over the porch.

“Rustic Imprint” is as purely impressionistic as Mirabelli gets. The small picture, only 11x14 inches, is a mass of brush strokes suggesting sky and mountains, even a bit of snow, surrounding a ghostly farmhouse. “Cinnamon Slate” shows Mirabelli's terrific use of color for emphasis: In the midst of a downward sloping field of feathered gray and against a paler gray sky, a farmhouse is roofed in a sort of cinnamon-cinnabar color mixed with little strokes of gray. 

Victor Mirabelli: Raw Impressions opens at Argazzi Art, 22 Millerton Road, Rte. 44, in Lakeville, CT, on Saturday, Aug. 29, and runs through Oct. 12. There will be an artist's reception Aug. 29 from 5 to 7 p.m. For information, call 860-435-8222 or go to www.argazziart.com.