These three painters share the upstairs gallery area of the Museum, and their very different approaches combine to make a well balanced exhibit. Clearly strongest of the trio is George Csengeri who paints large, somber-toned, roughly surfaced oils, often including collage elements. Forms are kept simple, sometimes open sometimes closed, and texture plays an important role. Often a kind of suspended or floating quality is achieved, although never departing from the essentially earthy appeal.
Orval Dillingham’s paintings are a rather weak cross between San Francisco figurative and Pop Art schools with a touch of Bonnard occasionally thrown in. Well composed genre and cityscape scenes, they lack personality of vision and variety in brushwork. Third man Alex Villumsons has moved far from his earlier open-formed action paintings into a superficial hard-edge style which includes isolated realistic elements. The result is shallow, contrived, and not even particularly pleasing in a decorative sense.
––Charleen Steen
