Alan Gerson’s Riverrun V, part of his Riverrun series, is typical in his addressing the contrast of nature and industry sitting side by side.

When central Europe meets the American South, strange things happen. If the art of the South has always had a romantic side that sometimes recalls the dreamy lyricism associated with the Southern accent, the art of central Europe similarly reflects the terseness of the region’s languages. It’s the difference between Clarence Laughlin and George Grosz, between John McCrady and Max Beckman, which is sort of like the difference between, say, Jimmie Davis’ "You Are My Sunshine" and Kurt Weill’s "Mack the Knife."

  It is well known that oil and water don’t mix, yet oil and vinegar create an interesting contrast, and the paintings of Alan Gerson at LeMieux and Steffen Thomas at Cole Pratt amount to an aesthetic tossed salad of crisply mixed metaphors. Not that their work has anything much in common beyond the decorous intrigue of stark ironies – qualities especially evident in the work of Gerson, who, although a New Orleans native, serves up healthy portions of central European-style angst in landscapes that might be merely bland in another artist’s hands.

  Riverrun V is emblematic, a view of what strikingly resembles the mighty Mississippi and its attendant industries as seen from a gap in the Tchoupitoulas Street flood wall. Actually, it’s part of a contiguous series of horizontal paintings that meander around the gallery the way a river meanders across the landscape, and that gap in the wall is an opening on to the world, as Gerson melds the local with the global. Here, industrious little tugs bustle along the river like ants on a giant anaconda, as ominous-looking trains traverse railroad tracks in the foreground. (Gerson’s railroads often have a "Last Train to Auschwitz" look about them.) Factory smokestacks across the river emit sickly wisps into the turbid air, but the devil is in the details: Inexplicable vents and bricked-over windows make bland industrial structures look more like Hitler’s bunker. If the style is realistic, the way it’s done is psychological, expressionistic.

  Aside from the novelty of a continuous panorama of paintings, Riverrun is interesting for the way it brings together the various facets of Gerson’s world view – a vision that has alternated between wryly effusive still-life studies and weird, oppressive cityscapes inhabited by rabid lawyers, victimized pedestrians and terrified children. As we proceed upriver, the landscape starts to look more like Uptown until we get to the point where the industry ends and the wooded shores begin.

  There, at a well-known river bend is a familiar scene as maniacal students from a nearby university appear to enact strange, pagan-looking rituals in the process of working out a sculpture installation on a landscape dominated by Gerson’s alien-looking foliage: towering, bloated succulents that look like they eat stray dogs for breakfast. The
manic students cavort among them lighting flaming pyres as medieval castles and towers loom in the distance, and here the style becomes a kind of magic realism where Kafka meets Twain.

  Perhaps it was his father’s business on Dryades Street in the old days (another Kafka-meets-Twain environment) that engendered this worldview. Parts of Dryades even now suggest a seedy section of Prague. Whatever its origins, Riverrun may well be Gerson’s most successful show to date.
Oddly and flatly, if beautifully, painted, it is an expedition into the landscape of experience where currents from the subconscious remind us of the twin terrors of the ages:
the capriciousness of nature, which can dispatch us without a moment’s notice; and
the oppression of our industrial civilization, which seduces us into a mechanical world where rules, technologies and man-made structures seem to determine our every move. It’s a contrast that Kafka and Twain might have relished.

  No less curious but very different in approach is the work of Steffen Thomas at Cole Pratt. Unlike Gerson, whose expressionism may be psychic or genetic, Thomas was a true German expressionist who settled in the South in the late 1920s and became established in Georgia as a sculptor of official busts and a painter of dream scenes, typically renditions of the women who came to be called his "muses" – floating, lyrical femmes that somehow recall both Marc Chagall and our own Jim Sohr. Although Thomas borrows all over the place from a variety of European artists, he brings to his work an emotional intensity that makes it all his own. As with Gerson, we see that the fully developed creative persona is ultimately as unique as a fingerprint or a strand of DNA, regardless of all the diverse pieces that come together along the way.