The first paintings Michael Gregory showed five years ago were large, squarish oils on canvas showing haystacks, bushes, and fallen trees set forward in open fields. Mysteriously engulfed by flames or left smoldering in the aftermath of some intensely localized apocalypse, the natural objects in them seemed to sputter in a dialect of irritably debased pastorale at the outer limits of contemporary experience. In his new pictures (all of them from 1988), Gregory has pulled back for more general, though no less cryptic, views of the same allegorical “elsewhere” terrain. Now he paints long, horizontal