Lost faces in the crowd

Friday, May 4, 2007 | 7:05 a.m.

What: "Matthew Radford: Watching You"

Where: Dust Gallery, 1221 S. Main St.

When: Through June 3

Information: 880-3878, www.dustgallery.com

A Matthew Radford painting that hangs in Patrick Duffy and Wally Goodman's home often provokes two questions: Who is the artist and how can we get our hands on his work?

Maybe it's the lure of voyeurism or maybe its the telling portrayal of individuals alone in a detached society. Whatever the reason, the large-scale composition of a dense crowd moving through a city street in "Second Avenue" has the same immediate chemistry that connects viewers to most of Radford's works.

"Matthew Radford: Watching You," on display at Dust Gallery through June 3, is a beautiful exhibit that caters to the same theme: crowds. Moreover, alienation among the masses.

The English artist began painting the hustle and bustle of crowds 15 years ago when he was living in New York City and walking Broadway to his studio in SoHo. The self-proclaimed people watcher began composing works of urban crowds in transit, focusing not only on the subject, but giving equal weight and emphasis to the spaces in between.

He likens the patterned work to fingerprints or the markings on the back of wasps - similar, but distinctively unique.

Radford studies crowds. "In New York they're much sharper and purposeful. In England, less purposeful, more meandering, enclosed in their own world and atmosphere, whereas in America , they're a lot more animated."

Working from photographs - he'll occasionally send someone to Liverpool Street Tube station to shoot 10 rolls of film - he looks at the images, puts them away, then "regurgitates the language " in his paintings.

Looking over his work at Dust last week, Radford expressed the sentiment of urban alienation present in the individuals moving independently among the group. His paintings are distant. You are never in the crowd.

The Dust exhibit features work based on ideas of surveillance, which Radford says is a big issue in England right now. There are acrylics on canvas, monotypes and small paintings on flat objects that he calls "urban driftwood." The acrylic on canvas paintings show silhouetted crowds as seen distorted through television or some other medium. The smaller paintings, which Radford calls "monitor paintings," are colorful, lively, made with perfectly, yet seemingly whimsically placed blotchy paint strokes. From afar the figures are clear and seemingly detailed, offering a little personality of the individuals. Up close the works are more abstract, showing only blotches of color on a flat image - similar to Impressionism.

The crowds in the monotypes seem infinite, as if they continue far beyond the image border. In some of his works the pronounced contrast of negative and positive space is blurred and somewhat swept away, further exemplifying the sense of media surveillance.

"Sometimes they become too narrative and about the people," he says. "Sometimes they're more of a pattern, but when they combine ... they're ideal."

Radford's earlier works would give a sense of place, often a street sign, but he's left out such symbols so the work would be more about the people. Given his changing approach, no exhibit is ever the same. Some works are blurry with broad strokes of paint covering the images. Others are crisp and articulate. Past works have been more abstract and on grids. Some works are created in layers, and Radford uses a tile scraper across the painting for a sense of "closed-circuit surveillance."

Save for a couple of West Coast exhibits, Radford's solo and group shows are almost exclusively in New York and London. His work is in collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Yale Center for British Art, among other institutional and private collections.

Dust Gallery, which started with young artists, has established enough of a reputation to grab such midcareer artists as Radford. Owner Naomi Arin, who learned of Radford through Goodman and Duffy, says she was pulled in by the mood of his paintings.

"I don't normally show figurative work," Arin says. "But I liked the mood of the paintings and how it's created by combining abstract and figurative. To see that in contemporary painting feels good."

Duffy says the exhibit is another bonus for Las Vegas: "To have someone with museum - quality work exhibiting here kind of shows where Las Vegas is headed in the art arena."