Painting with a photographer’s eye

Downes, born in England, has long lived in the United States. Now in his 70s, he is esteemed not only as a painter but as a writer. His art is the subject of a retrospective exhibition — his first ever — that has come to the Portland Museum of Art from the Parrish Art Museum in Southhampton, N.Y., where it was organized by Klaus Ottmann.

The show arrives as critics and curators have been adjusting their view of Downes’s work, retrieving it from the conservative associations of a plodding, overly literal realism and aligning it instead with objectivity, process, and seriality, all values associated with minimalism.

In many ways, reassessing plein air painting in terms of minimalism (a big deal in the ’70s, when Downes embarked on his mature style, and still today) seems a mental leap too far. I’m not sure what to make of it.

The Portland show includes 25 paintings, almost all of them remarkable in one way or another. Panoramic views of oilfields, landfill sites, bridges, street corners, and farm buildings, they reveal much about the fabric of this country. Standing before them you become embroiled in their teeming detail: The light, the shadows, the sense of expansion and grandeur are all there.

Looking away, however, it’s easy to succumb to the sense that you have turned away from an embalmed corpse, a thing uncannily robbed of its aura.

In what sense are Downes’s paintings photographic? Just as the camera notices things the glimpsing eye would never see, his panoramas are preternaturally detailed. To be sure, he uses his eyes to perceive this detail, “eyeballing’’ his subjects for days, weeks, and months at a time, always returning to the same spot at the same times of day. But the end result is similar: a kind of glut of noticing.

Good photographers know how to compose detail, which is forever in flux, into memorable form. Downes has this ability too. He started out as an abstract painter. And although he is opposed, in principle (if not always in reality), to fabricating what is in front of him, he chooses very carefully both his views and the stretched-out formats in which he presents them.