Alan Pocaro reviews the exhibition A Fine Line, Drawings by Richard Allan George and Peter Loewer, recently on view at Malton Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio.
Pocaro notes: "George has created a series of images whose nearest analogs are the Polynesian paintings of Paul Gauguin. In those works, Gauguin replaced the reality of a Tahiti dominated by French colonial rule with an idealized paradise of semi-naked, mystic 'primitives', close to nature and free of western inhibitions. In many of his drawings and paintings, Richard George seems to have been after something similar: an alternative reality not defined by Western conventions of social propriety, a place where nudity is synonymous with authenticity. But whereas Gauguin depicts a world charged with mystery and eroticism, the sexual tensions in George's drawings are subdued, if detectable at all."