he painter Ron Milewicz has recently debuted two related series of works: cityscapes painted on site in Long Island City and a set of tableaus based on classical myth that makes use of this industrial landscape as its setting. Milewicz's views of the vast spaces of the urban periphery set against the distant Manhattan skyline continue his exploration of the tensions between intense observation, pictorial construction, and synthetic high key color. In her catalogue essay, art critic Karen Wilkin writes of Milewicz's cityscapes as “thoughtful explorations of perception, meditations on the city in which he lives, filtered through an innate sense of geometric order ... Milewicz's disciplined cityscapes engage us first by their seeming fildelity to appearances but they soon reveal their artifice, becoming stranger, even slightly disturbing, with longer viewing. Nothing is quite what it seems ... Invention and measurement transcend the limits of perception.” Milewicz's haunting depictions reimagine New York City as a mythic place and provide the backgrounds for the dramas enacted on the tabletops back in his studio. As Wilkin notes in her essay “Milewicz's uncanny dissections of the story of the death of Laocoon and his sons or of Theseus and the Minotaur fullfill the implications of his cityscapes.” Of these works she observes “Milewicz paints eerie, passionate evocations of classical myths, reinvented in ways informed equally by the legacy of antiquity and contemporary vernacular culture ... we are drawn into these small, fierce pictures, compelled to enter mentally their miniature theatrical universe.”
• Installation Detail, 2005
• Laocoon II, oil on panel, 24 x 24", 2005
• Citiwide, Morning, oil on linen, 12 x 30", 2005
• Citiwide, Late Afternoon, oil on linen, 8 x 32", 2005
• Installation Detail, 2003 • 23rd Street, oil on linen, 51 x 67", 2003
• "No. 7", Oil on Linen, 31.5 x 63", 2003 • Long Island City Snow, Oil on Two Canvases, 25 x 20", 2003
• Blue Long Island City, Oil on Canvas, 20 x 20", 2003 • Woodside Station, Oil on Canvas, 20 x 30", 2003

• Brooklyn Bridge Parking, Oil on Linen Stretchers, 62.5 x 50", 2003
• View of Manhattan, Oil on Linen, 30 x 60", 2002 • Queens Boulevard/Manhattan, 1, Oil on Canvas, 10 1/2 x 21", 2001
• New York Harbor, Oil on Wood, 8 x 16", 1998 • Manhattan, Watercolor on Paper, 8 x 11", 2001
• Still-life with Blue Bulb, Oil on Canvas, 8 x 16", 2001 • Still-life with Orage Paint Jar, 2, Oil on Canvas, 18 x 20", 2001
• Resume: Ron Milewicz
• For additional information please email or contact the gallery. gallery@georgebillis.com
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