Landscape exhibit a study in contrast

In “Art Seen” each month, NEWS art critic Jenna Russell will single out some of the artwork showing in Maine and tell readers why it’s worth their while to take in an exhibit in Bangor, Portland or other parts. The column runs the second Thursday of every month.

“The Landscape: Two Views,” paintings by Michael Lewis and R. Edward Nadeau at the Clark House Gallery, Bangor, through December.

“Quiet explosion” is an oxymoron, but it does describe the paintings of Orono’s Michael Lewis. In the recent “Red Sky at Night” and “Radiant Passage,” light blasts out of the cloud masses, minus melodramatic trumpet fanfare. The gently blurred washes of lime, wine and magenta make a muted beauty of the atmospheric violence.

In the next room, landscapes by another Orono painter, Ed Nadeau, fairly crackle. In “Milkweed at Sunset,” a pod unfurls and lets go its seeds over rusty grass. It’s death opening the door, a gnarled hand clutching. Nadeau’s “Red Tree Stump” rests on its side, prickly, dissatisfied. It may be dead or bleeding, or it may be a comic-book dynamite stick, ready to explode.

Liveliest of all are Nadeau’s paintings of compost heaps: electrified hay bales barely contained by wire and red wood stakes. Man is unseen but present in these scenes, the invisible force prompting the process of change. Friction between man and nature seems to seethe at the heart of the paintings.

By contrast, the world of Mike Lewis feels mature, resigned. If man is present here, he has let go of the fight, accepting his role as supplicant and celebrant in the all-powerful natural world.

(128 Hammond St., 942-9162, 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday)

Paintings by Dennis Perrin at Maine’s Massachusetts House Gallery, Lincolnville, through December.

Devotees of John Singer Sargent, Edmund Tarbell and other old Boston School painters will want to see this small group of highly civilized paintings, notable for their smooth, polished surfaces and modulated forms.

Perrin creates high Victorian time travels, a world of high-collared women on antique couches that open like seashells. The art is all about light, filtered through gauzy white curtains, or focused noontime bright in a grassy lawn-hollow. The dresses are white, but white in Perrin’s hands incorporates the spectrum, from blue to gray to mauve.

The compositions are most interesting when a couch sits at an angle, or a face is turned away — when something offsets the perfection of silver teapots and varnished wood floors. Man-made objects gorgeously imitate the natural world: a tablecloth cascades like moving water; a pink sash falls and opens like the petals of a flower.

This is beauty at its most blatant, and the pleasure of it is enough to make the Puritan-minded viewer slightly uncomfortable. Perrin was educated in New Orleans, and the paintings seem infused with that city’s perpetual springtime and old-world gentility. It’s intoxicating, if it does leave you searching for a good old-fashioned moral.

(Route 1, 789-5705, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday)

“Salon de Fax” at the University of Maine Museum of Art, Orono, through Jan. 20.

In a recent magazine interview, the new museum curator at Bowdoin College, Katy Kline, called college museums “the only place to be” because they have “a freedom and flexibility and a kind of intellectual mandate that the large public museums can’t indulge in.”

In other words, UMaine doesn’t have to show crowd pleasers like Monet just to keep people paying the price of admission (there is no admission fee).

By the same token, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston probably won’t paper its walls with faxes anytime soon.

There’s something to be said, though, for “Salon de Fax,” a crazy idea that went beyond the talking stage. Museum Director Wally Mason invited faxes from artists, schoolchildren and pretty much anyone else, and the faxes came in from everywhere, Kansas to Barcelona.

There are close-ups of doughnuts, poetry and slogans, a 17-page reinterpretation of “American Gothic,” even statistics showing the percentage of female staff in various college art departments.

The show is black and white and wall-to-wall. It’s funny and bewildering. Cover sheets hang side by side with fax art. Lists of travel agency bargains that came in by fax were also declared art and slapped in the show.

What does it all mean? Well, it’s democratic — all-American, somehow. Each wall functions as a busy, remarkable whole. It’s like being a prisoner inside a fax machine, hypnotized by the mysterious hum of churning paper. It’s an X-ray of the American psyche. Maybe.

(Carnegie Hall, 581-3255, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday)

Paintings by Barbara Applegate at the Bayview Gallery, Camden, through December.

Bayview Gallery owner John Starr says that every year the gallery has a “find,” a new artist who looks to be doing something worthwhile. In 1998, he says, Barbara Applegate was the Bayview’s big discovery.

There aren’t a plethora of her paintings on display, but those that are scattered about show an appealing freshness of feeling and lightness of hand. The Impressionistic “Beach Roses” is like flowers seen through warped glass, and the large watercolor “Autumn, Camden Harbor” turns a working boat into something ethereal, a heron lifting off or a dragonfly.

It’s Applegate’s oils that really stand out, especially “Flurries, Guerneytown Road” and “December Morning, Appleton Ridge.” A smoky delicacy in the foggy hills and smudged trees of these paintings elevates them from landscapes to something greater, studies in regret or music or memory.

(33 Bayview St., 236-4534, 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Sunday)