Looking at Venice, in the abstract

Mary Armstrong's "Mapping the Venetian Lagoon" is at Victoria Munroe Fine Art on Newbury Street through January 26.

Mary Armstrong spent the fall of 2006 wandering the streets and canals of Venice and teaching painting at Venice International University.

"With every breath, I took it all in," she writes in the small catalog that accompanies her exhibit at Victoria Munroe Fine Art. "The cobalt green of the lagoon, the molten gold light reflecting on water, the pink palaces on the Grand Canal, the golden filigree of late afternoon ripples."

The glow of Venice seeps out of her mixed-media works on paper. They don't depict postcard visions; Armstrong has based these absorbing, layered, delicately rendered pieces on 15th-century maps of the Venetian lagoon. The aerial-view paintings recall the maritime history of the lagoon, home to the more than 100 islands that make up Venice and connected by inlets to the Adriatic Sea. In the 1400s, Venice was a naval and mercantile force in Europe.

At the same time, Armstrong's works are gorgeous, contemporary abstract paintings. The layers of oil pastel sometimes look caked on; they crack open to reveal wandering waterways. The surfaces appear almost translucent, with unexpected greens or reds shining through layers of pale beige.

The colors burn on the page. "Laguna Little Jewel" has the water shining like a candlelit burgundy wine, and the edge where land meets sea warms to ember red, a feverish touch of water to earth. The land itself is iridescent pink, veined with red canals. The color infuses the scene with life that most maps can't chart; there's a sense of skin, arteries, and inflammation.

The diptych "Mapping the Venetian Lagoon Series 2, #10" has a circular emblem in the top left depicting a winged lion, which is the symbol of St. Mark, Venice's patron saint. We can see gouged into the pastel the beginnings of a grid, which suggest municipal development. Armstrong has made the water black-red, shot through with bright red skeins, as if it is on fire, while on land the pastel looks like aging clay, threaded with cracks.

The artist also deploys brilliant blues and greens. In "Mapping the Venetian Lagoon Series 2, #1," royal blue water seamed with gold leaf surrounds turquoise land. Armstrong veils the whole scene in a pastel shot with gold, like a haze of sunlight.

The sensual pleasures of looking at Armstrong's paintings - the seeping, warm tones, the tactile quality of the pastels - are morsels that recall Venice itself, just as a divine pasta e fagioli can.

Sculptural painting
Minimalist painter Bill Thompson is also a sensualist. Just look at "Conomo," one of his signature pieces in "Dialects," his show up at Barbara Krakow Gallery. Like Armstrong, Thompson builds up his surface in many layers. But unlike her, Thompson works generally in monochromes, and with automotive paints.

"Conomo" is as much sculpture as painting; the picture plane undulates deliciously, like the rise and fall of the sea, an abstraction of hills, or a woman's body. The paint is pearly aqua blue. The paint itself and the rolling surface drink the light in and toss it playfully back out at you. There's a bewitching tension between surface and depth.

All that "Conomo" embodies sets the bar high for Thompson. There's an element of rapture to it that marries sensual and spiritual. The rest of "Dialects" falls short, not because the paintings are any less rigorous, but because the exhibit presents Thompson's work as a series of intellectual problems he sets out to solve. Where one painting on its own can take your breath away, several begin to read more like dry visual equations.

For instance, in "BE-AU-TY" Thompson articulates the same curve three times, in white and black. He mounts the three panels one over the next to create a swan's neck arc. It's an artist's version of something a 4-year-old might set up with matching cards.

"Nightfall" is a six-piece grid with three panels on top, two in the middle and one on the bottom. For each lower level, Thompson combines the pigments of the two panels above. There's a certain fascination with the tones, as they move deeper toward black. But where's the sheer delight that we see in a piece such as "Conomo"?

It shows up only here and there. The pink "Deviant" sets two curves, one above the other. The bottom one is a symmetrical bell curve. The one on the top is asymmetrical; the two tense against each other, suggesting a wave surging and receding. The area between bevels inward, like a riverbank. Thompson has painted inside that bank with a glossy finish; outside, it's matte. "Deviant" is a monochrome, but it's hardly just about pink. The piece brims with insinuation in its arcs, its interiority, its sheen. Like "Conomo," it's sexy, busting through the parameters of a painter's intellectual experiment into something far more alluring.