ART REVIEW

Updating Romanticism: In 1993, Joan Nelson made a lithograph of a pastoral landscape in the style of 19th century naive artist Edward Hicks, painter of the syrupy classic “Peaceable Kingdom.� Last year, Nelson hand-painted 15 of the prints, 11 of which are on view at Cirrus in an intriguing little show bridging the earnest idealism of the past with the destabilizing skepticism of today.

Nelson’s original print depicts a gently rolling greenscape in the foreground, framed by two trees, each bearing both leafy branches and a broken trunk, making them simultaneous symbols of both the fertile and the barren. In the middle distance flows a river with an idyllic island of perfect trees and in the background spreads a harmoniously symmetrical mountain range. The air is pink and luminous at the horizon, a crisp turquoise higher up.

The New York-based Nelson, well known for self-consciously imbuing her work with the preciousness of the antique, graced the print with a constellation of small brown spots known as fox-marks and a delicate crackle pattern common to aged oil paintings.

Painting over the prints, Nelson sometimes altered the weather, the mood or the imagery itself, painting out the river entirely or adding a third, stumpy tree. The liberties she takes in resuscitating Hicks and tweaking his quaint, obsolete romanticism into relevance again are distinctly Postmodern; but they’re also unapologetically sensual, with their glorious sheens and nostalgia-infused varnishes. Nelson’s spirited romp through traditional landscape conventions and her technical whimsy endow these works with both depth and currency.

*

* Cirrus Gallery, 542 S. Alameda St., (213) 680-3473, through Nov. 8.