Mountain Man

Unlike photography, painting isn’t usually accused of false representation. Whereas photographers can crop, magnify, Photoshop, and endlessly manipulate an image, paintings, by nature, require an intermediary between fact and audience, rendering the work a product of its own magical realm—and beyond the scope of skepticism. But in “Bracket,” the current show at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery by the Seattle-born New York artist Cameron Martin, painting isn’t given this benefit of the doubt. The 40-year-old Martin, known for his chillingly spare nature studies, has subjected his canvasses to a violently intrusive editing process—a triptych of rugged mountainscapes executed in acrylic with an industrial paint sprayer suggests multiple exposures; elsewhere, rock-face studies are shoved to the side of the canvas as blank columns fill the rest of the space. Here, mountains stop feeling like eternal truths, and painting, for once, admits its own duplicitous nature. More info at gvdgallery.com