Robert Rauschenberg began his series of “Gluts” sculptures following a 1985 visit to his native Texas, where the economy had recently been ravaged by a sharp downturn in the oil market. Expansive boom years ended suddenly as a result of the international oil glut that undermined the price of Texas’ most stable cash crop. Everywhere Rauschenberg traveled he witnessed the visual echoes of prosperity cast asunder, most particularly in the curiously poetic remnants of abandoned industrial equipment that bears mute but poignant witness to the collapse of a multilevel and interdependent system. For

Rosalyn Schwartz’s dark, dreamy landscapes and still lifes are characterized by a humid and brooding dankness. She is an artist much interested in the moment when the fecund becomes the fetid, when ripeness is poised on the inevitable brink of decay. There is a willful romanticism in all of this, and Schwartz’s work seems fueled by a desire to discover in nature a metaphor for the modulations of the human spirit.

In Offering, 1990, an incredible goblet, overflowing with grapes in a bacchic paean of dark joy, emerges from a dim background. A carpet of deep violet and purple fruit hangs heavy with

Frank Lobdell’s recent pictures suggest narration the way Australian bark paintings do, by spreading and tilting bits of pictorial incident to give a sense of elastic time. The widely stacked swatches of radiant colors mostly trued-up blues, blacks, greens, and thunderous yellows—perform as syntactical compartments that interlock emotionally, whatever their rationale. Their hues are like the perfumes of colors you once thought there were precise names for. Each painting could be the story of a particular day, from sunrise to midnight, and the soul’s mood swings within that span. To each localized