Simultaneously conservative and eerie, David Klamen’s recent paintings depict curiously quiet scenes enveloped in an amber haze. He conjoins a scrupulous realist technique of the most academic sort with a slavish commitment to treacly varnish. Immersed in layer upon layer of this syrupy stuff, his imagery is rendered all sepia and vaguely historicist, obscured and imprisoned under veneers of shiny gloss. Klamen creates a browned-out world with an attendant aura of instant nostalgia, mimicking the mummifying practices of early art conservation, and everywhere evoking a sense of painting’s possible