In it, a boy sits below a single, glowing light bulb, wearing shorts, a green shirt and an orange tie. He contemplates six or seven nude women who tower over him (so this painting is not suitable for reproduction in a family newspaper). They are a disturbing mix of wraithlike and voluptuous. Rib cages, hipbones, and shoulder blades protrude, but there’s still an erotic charge to these women, whose heads loll and knees knock. Their skin, gray and iridescent, suggests that they are ghosts.
Schwartz’s use of color in this dark painting is inspired; even the shadows are full of orange and green, and the atmosphere is almost tactile, as if imagination has its own muddy feel. The boy’s muses, and their mingling of sex and death, bring us right to the edge of innocence, and the hope and horror of losing it.
The painter’s other works are smaller, all harrowing portraits. “Tapiola (Sibelius),’’ made in 1991, is painted on velvet, but it’s nothing like, say, an Elvis Presley portrait on velvet. This, all in grays that ruffle against the black ground, shows the Finnish composer with eyes closed. It could be a death mask; it looks wreathed in crinkled fabric. The face appears to coalesce out of shadow and light. Another ghost.
Benjamin Evans, who graduated just last year from the New England School of Art and Design at Suffolk University, has an installation like a theatrical set up at NAGA, and two moody black-and-white photos depicting the characters who might inhabit it. “Coffee With Just Milk’’ takes us into the home of a couple, Benjamin and Judy Benson, circa 1991. There’s a People magazine from that year on a rack beneath the telephone, touting Paula Abdul as “Hollywood’s hottest newcomer.’’
