Overkill

[June 21st, 2006] Jim Riswold has a knack for imbuing his photographs with subversive yet somehow non-threatening irony, a talent well showcased at Augen in three shows over the course of the past year and a half. The photographer's Legoland/action-figure tableaux of notorious Nazi war criminals managed to both punctuate and defang the horrors they invoked, while his Napoleonic vignettes owed much of their impact to wry titles and immaculate lighting. In Riswold's latest outing, he takes a different tack, reproducing Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper as an oversized cartoonish screenprint. There are a brain-numbing 44 of these prints on display, presumably intended to demonstrate the painstaking nature of the printmaking process as colors are methodically added to shapes. Unlike in Riswold's previous shows, there is little fun to be had in the exhaustive current endeavor, a fact that may have to do with the sheer overkill of the repeated imagery. The show might succeed on the level of didactic conceptual art, but that is not what we have come to expect from this artist, whose highest gift is for winky satire, not Philip Glass-style tedium. 817 SW 2nd Ave., 224-8182. Closes June 27.

Other notable shows currently up across town include Chris Lundy's bravura wave forms at Genuine Imitation (625 NW Everett St., #110, 241-3189. Closes June 30), Benjamin Stagl and Ryah Radomski's nylon forms at Rake (325 NW 6th Ave., 750-0754. Closes June 30), and Paula Scott's eccentric figuration at Broderick (814 SW 1st Ave., 224-4020. Closes June 30). At Portland Art Center, Jeff Fontaine's distressed metal geometries are well executed, if not particularly original, while the upstairs group show underwhelms except for Tony Raynor's paintings and Marilyn Joyce's I ride that way in my mind, which, with its impeccable rhythm and piquant color, comes across rather like mustard raining from a turquoise sky. (32 NW 5th Ave., 236-3322. Closes June 25.) Finally, at Chambers, painter Guy Martelet pastiches well-rendered Renaissance portraiture, floral and avian imagery, and other symbols atop spartan, one-dimensional picture planes. There is much technical mastery but little life in these ultimately bloodless works. (207 SW Pine St., #102, 227-9398. Closes June 30.)