Art

Paul Miyamoto’s “Recent Paintings,” David Klopfenstein’s “Hand-colored Photographs,” and Jérôme Douillet’s metalworks are at the Clown until January 2. Mon-Wed 10-6, Thurs-Sat 10-7, Sun 12-5, 123 Middle St., Portland (207)756-7399.

painter Paul Miyamoto and asked him if he’d exhibited work in the last Portland Museum of Art Biennial. It turns out there was a guy with a Japanese surname in the show. He patiently told the inquirer that he had not. Then came the inevitable follow-up question: “Where is it that you come from?” Wanting to hear the name of some exotic Pacific Asian location, the inquirer was dumbstruck by his reply: “Troy,” Miyamoto said. You could almost hear the person thinking: is there a Troy in Japan? Maybe Okinawa…? Miyamoto continued: “Troy, New York.”

If we can even speak of an America today, exchanges like this reveal it as more imaginary than real. Miyamoto was born in America. His family has lived here for generations, and his life has been a transcontinental one: Arizona, California, New York, now Portland. His view of America was formed through uncounted hours watching it through a car window, drifting in and out of awareness as the world passed by. His work reflects it.

His “Untitled (Red Tail Lights),” one of two large thickly painted oils, shows a tiny sedan alone on a road, its tail lights glowing underneath the weight of the massive dome of the night sky. As the car burrows into the dense indigo engulfing it, pushing on into the miles of highway ahead, the night itself comes to life. Stars turn from light-years-away specks into luminous orbs; the expanse of sky becomes a weighty fabric with violet and ultramarine patches pushing and pulling in different directions. In another image, a smaller gouache on paper called “Untitled (House),” this night sky is depicted as a heavy curtain, its folds about to swallow up a tiny white house.

The drama created between humans and the vast unknown of the surrounding natural world ties Miyamoto’s paintings to the tradition of the 19th-century Romantic artists. Miyamoto shows an even closer connection with American painter Edward Hopper. Their resemblance has little to do with a shared style, and everything to do with an attentiveness to the emotional charge of everyday situations, whether sitting under fluorescent lights at an all-night diner in a Hopper painting, or in Miyamoto’s car cockpits during a late-night drive.

But where Hopper’s images have a gut-wrenching sense of loneliness, Miyamoto’s work has a quality more like those childhood nights of looking at the configurations of constellations, contemplating them with wonder and delight. It’s this mood of meditative playfulness that puts us behind the wheel of one of Miyamoto’s cars, watching the imagination wander as the odometer ticks away, wondering where the people in the car you’ve been following for 50 miles might be going, what might be waiting for them when they get there.

Apart from gallery space, Miyamoto’s and David Klopfenstein’s work share little in common. Despite the diversity of Miyamoto’s subject matter — from his highway-scapes to his gouaches on old type-setting cards found in a library trashcan 25 years ago — his lighthearted longing makes the works cohere. By comparison, Klopfenstein’s hand-colored photographs seem inconsistent in relation to each other. This owes to the show’s inclusion of two starkly different sets of photographs: a group of striking still-life work, and a group of New England landscapes that waters them down. One landscape, “Penobscot Bay,” depicts that abandoned-dinghy-in-the-sea-grass that we all know so well. Another, “Dusky Shore,” is a beautiful image of . . . a shore at dusk. In the Johannesburg Biennial these skillfully crafted works might be alluring and exotic. In Maine, however, where such images are everywhere, you need an innovative approach to produce something besides more of the same quaint imagery that adorns walls from Eastport to Kittery.

Innovation is also necessary to stand out in the still-life genre, but here Klopfenstein’s work is entrancing: he gives household decorations and foodstuffs an intensity ranging from otherworldly to erotic. His “Eggplant” is Eros incarnated in the kitchen. A richly colored eggplant leans delicately against the lip of a cool, white marble bowl, their kiss leaving the slightest crease in the eggplant’s surface. In “Blue Crock,” oranges piled high in a ceramic crock look down upon the discarded peelings from one of their number, the remains casting a sinister shadow in their direction. Such works move from otherwise technically excellent hand-colored photographs into images with lives of their own.

Jérôme Douillet’s functional metalworks have a more understated presence in the show, and their stillness makes them easy to overlook. His work — like his descending-size set of five square, silver “Trays,” hollowed out in the middle — is Minimalist houseware, serene and attractive. Douillet writes of his works: “The immemorial culture of man can be transmuted into a spiritually charged metal object.” It may be more persuasive in French. Luckily the work doesn’t need a sales pitch. n

Night visions

Paul Miyamoto, David Klopfenstein, and Jérôme Douillet at the Clown