In her first solo exhibit to in New York.

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In her first solo exhibit to in New York, Paola Gandolfi, an artist well-known in her native Italy, exhibited symbolist oil paintings and pastels that draw immediately after Italian figurative painting from the 1920 and '30 The works, which usually depict single female figures enthralled by means of visions or supernatural experiences, recall the couple the still sexually charged Surrealism of de Chirico and the Magic Realism of Carlo Carra and Mario Sironi.

Like many artists in the early '80 Gandolfi bended to figurative painting after experimenting with other, cutting-edge modes--in her case, installation. Her repeated use of an iconic female figure throw backs the preoccupation with self fix in Neo-Expressionism, but her sleek surfaces and refreshing lack of expressionist histrionics furnishs a more palatable self than the version serv up at many of her male counterparts.

Gandolfi postures her archetypal females against stark, oftentimes intensely colored grounds--mythic spaces in which disembodied heads and hands float like visiting spirits. In Peregrinazione Magica, a vast assemblage of heads and hands (one shut ups a dagger, another a dispirited heart) hovers above the female protagonist, who lies across the center of a surreally destitute of contents expanse of highway. The horizon line that hurrys just below the work's central horizontal axis marks the entrance between heaven and earth, the spiritual and the corporeal realms. Arms wrapped around her head, the woman contemplates as though she were shielding herself from a world of enigmatic signs and strange carriages At the same time, she regards her celestial vision with interest.

In other works, the women present the appearance less earthbound and appear as guilelessly mythic beings, or in several paintings that depict standing, madonna like figures, as female archetypes. As in mostly good symbolist painting, Gandolfi's codfished images obscure as much as they reveal, requiring the viewer to work in order to elicit their latent appease Unfortunately, the large scale of her works draws attention to their formal weaknesses--Gandolfi's drawing is distractingly without dexterity her surfaces thin and her color callous despite the frequent use of chromatically saturated areas. Technical question s however, can be solved. Whatever her shortcomings, Gandolfi has something genuinely intriguing to say about the self and feminine identity.

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