Galleries: Painters for whom lyrical abstraction is very much alive

Anyone who would tell you that lyrical, gestural abstract painting breathed its last in the late 1980s hasn't been spending much time around Philadelphia. During the last five years or so, a number of city galleries have found themselves at least one young painter who has fallen under the spell of De Kooning or Joan Mitchell or both. (Charles Burchfield's late, revelatory - some would say hallucinatory - landscapes of the 1940s and '50s, which teeter on abstraction, are more influential than ever, too.)

There couldn't be a better time, in other words, to turn a fresh eye to the lyrical abstraction of Darra Keeton and Mary Nomecos, two painters who have been developing and refining their respective visual languages for more than two decades.

Keeton, who attended the New York Studio School, got an M.F.A. from Queens College, CUNY, and teaches painting at Rice University, has never previously shown her work in the Philadelphia area. Nomecos, a Philadelphia resident and graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, has exhibited here regularly since the late 1970s.

A survey of Keeton's paintings at Swarthmore College's List Gallery shows her stylistic evolution between 1991 and 2009, a prolific period in which she initiated and moved between at least six bodies of work on paper and canvas.

Hope, a small painting from 1991 and one of the earliest works in her show, is very much a product of its time, when a group of young New York artists were looking at the paintings of such artists as Burchfield, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Norman Bluhm (still alive then, and creating his most original work) and forming their own hybrids of landscape and biomorphic abstraction.

But it's also the key to Keeton's development, containing many of the organic forms, gestures, and colors that she goes on to deploy in subsequent works. In the series titled "Locus" and "In Vivo," she isolates various forms from nature or, as in the monoprints from the series "Code," reconfigures and compresses them into pillar-like shapes that look like they're composed of writhing snakes - although flattened doughnuts and sausages come to mind as well.

In 1998, Keeton introduced a compositional element that resembles scaffolding or architecture in the process of collapsing, in a gouache-on-paper series called "Axon." The resemblance of these images to the much-photographed collapse of the World Trade Center towers, three years in the future, is so uncanny, so seemingly prophetic, that you wonder if Keeton is prescient or just so keenly tuned in to the possibilities of structures that she automatically imagines how they will deconstruct.

Clearly, she later took note of the similarities between her images and the towers: The paintings from her "Theory of Forgetting" series, begun in 2001 - among them Theory of Forgetting 8, in which yellow scaffolding seems to be melting in molten orange - undoubtedly were her visceral response to the events of 9/11.

On paper, Nomecos - whose exhibition at Rosenfeld Gallery is in its final day - has a lighter, more spontaneous hand than Keeton, who plays up her fumbles when they occur and encourages dripping. Nomecos' paintings on paper and canvas are more purely abstract than Keeton's, too, though they're easily imagined as landscapes (Helen Frankenthaler, Richard Diebenkorn, and Joan Mitchell would seem to be Nomecos' most likely touchstones).

It's hard to tell whether Nomecos prefers to paint on paper, which she does easily and confidently, or on canvas, where she devotes herself to the material qualities of oil paint and an abstraction more obviously based on nature.

It's an interesting dichotomy to study in person. Her works on paper are light-filled improvisations that seem to float (a quality nicely enhanced by the white wood frames they're "floated" within) and give the impression of painted thoughts or daydreams. Her oil paintings, made up of large areas of colors of similar values - a minty green, the dusty pink of rose quartz, a soft sandstone yellow - suggest massive ancient forms in the landscape, immune to any artist's whims.