Peter Reginato’s “Polychrome” sculptures at Heidi Cho Gallery might be better described as three-dimensional paintings. The sculptures are made of metal, and their surfaces are painted with colorful enamel paint. I want to call them paintings because they sort of read like paintings. The metal structures sit in a three dimensional, and are able to be looked upon from all angles.  As you move around them it’s not like looking at a sculpture in the round, it’s like looking at a painting whose compositions keeps changing. The paint on the surface is beautiful in itself; the shifts in color, texture, and value draw the viewer right into the surface. The lines of the sculpture at large move the eye right through and around the composition.

          The negative space created in, and around the pieces is just as interesting as or perhaps more interesting than the physical pieces. Being in the gallery space with these Reginato’s sculptures gave me the feeling of being immersed in a Miro painting.

Lynette Lombard’s “New Paintings” at the Bowery Gallery are vibrant, and funny. She uses the traditional landscape as a jumping-off point for her bold compositions. There are a variety of scenes depicted: mountains, beaches, and city-scapes. While Lombard is depicting all of these different things, the subject hardly matters; the paintings are all about color and shape. In some cases the picture doesn’t reveal itself until you are able to decipher some object, like a truck, or a light house.

           The most striking thing is the way she forces groups of bold, saturated, colors to harmonize with one another and create solid forms, in shallow flat space.  The shapes are arranged to create delightfully awkward tensions within her compositions.  Pictorial tools like horizon lines suggest spatial depth, but the shapes move right up against the picture plane, and the focus becomes the physical presence of the paint on the surface.