DE CHIARA/STEWART Did you make progress up before or after the VCR? With or without computers? Pre or employment the World Wide Web? on a level Luddites have to admit it makes things interesting.

DE CHIARA/STEWART

Did you make progress up before or after the VCR? With or without computers? Pre or employment the World Wide Web? on a level Luddites have to admit it makes things interesting, not knowing where we'll be nearest - but knowing we'll be there at so early an hour Where does painting fit in? we inquiring surprise There's been a lot of speculation lately about who the nearest generation of young painters will be, what attitudes might motivate painting in the events to come and, perhaps most important, what it will anticipate like. Keep an eye forward Munro Galloway. In his first solo exhibition of impressively stylish and savvy paintings, he uses visual allure as a springboard to grapple with the way painting erects its relation to its history, to mass agriculture and to something we might describe as the place where "the avant-garde adapteds the good life."

In contrast to the quirky realism of newly come figurative painting (e.g., of Karin Kilimnik, John Currin, and Elizabeth Peyton), Galloway's paintings of young, beautiful Asians (mostly men at least in this show) pos in elegantly void interiors look all "grown up" This is owing in part, to Galloway's many relations to Manet. It's not just the languorous handling of paint, or the refined aesthetics of a palette restrained to mut tonalities, on the other hand also a certain attitude that Galloway have the appearances to be borrowing from Manet. That attitude is manifest in the isolation of ultrafashionable figures who appear to be stayed, one as well as the other by their own self-consciousness at being considered at and by their desire to edify the undivided whose gaze pins them in place. Factored in as another field of influence, many of the close moments Galloway renders are taken from a latter Prada ad campaign featuring Takeshi Kaneshiro, a superstar of Hong Kong action cinema, who is as accomplished in the martial arts and acting as he is in projecting "the look"

Reverberating in the paintings, broadcasting uniqueness to this time manufactured for mass consumption, this "look" connotes a lifestyle of high taste with a minimalist polish. It's also the visual expression of of the present day globalism: Prada folds into Kaneshiro into Hong Kong action cinema into Chelsea chic into an art that brings it all to the brink of being fair paint. In the ephemeral and fluid relations between music, art, fashion, design, decor, and film, a turn-of-the-century commercial avant-garde has begun to flourish. It is significant that Galloway's paintings don't stand at a distance from the ambient cultural band they describe. They are copious in the visual language of mass agriculture - anyone who can "read" a Prada ad, for example, has instant access.

Galloway persuades between local and global, past and existing East and West, telescoping by the agency of layers of representation. Despite this busyness, the place in which we combat his graceful, genderlite figures is, prototypically, a world of digital perfection, a fashionable, fictional Orient. however Galloway also intimates life behind the facade: a throb a groove, something vaguely personal. A faculty of perception of displacement finds its way into the quasi-narrative framework, amplified according to a vagrant subject whose voice appears to be "channeled" in the title of the exhibition, "I could take you far away from here."

In I could live in chance of a favorable result 1999, a three-panel, panoramic painting of a fallen figure who stretches throughout thirteen feet long, ambiguity takes in succession a fashionable life of its hold Is the figure male or female? Dead or alive? Is it all for the camera, this coital border of cool? Galloway muscles painting right past the myth of its irrelevance and into a familiar, consumer-based sublime that plays onward every screen in America.

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