t Phillips Gallery, Rampton’s heavily textured oil landscapes—displayed alongside Dan Toone’s metal sculpture—explore illusion and flatness through palette knife gestures.

I have friends who deny themselves the pleasures of visiting a gallery, so determined are they to avoid the wall signs that they interpret as telling them how to look at the art, how to interpret it, and how to respond. They’re equally determined not to read the sort of writing 15 Bytes provides—like the text you’re reading here. Many of them are themselves artists: I was privileged to write a number of times about the irreplaceable Sam Wilson, who cooperated fully by opening his studio, answering my questions, and even sharing hundreds of drawings. But he never read a word of the results.

I’m thinking about this because, during the opening at Phillips, Friday night, I wondered what someone who chose not to read anything about the art would make of the three collections of work on display. They would probably dig Dan Toone, who makes literally heavy metal into visible, spatial music, requiring no explanation and offering none. But what about the other two bodies of work, which appear to have nothing whatsoever in common? The large paintings invoke the presence of objects in space, primarily trees but also birds and weathered rock towers. These have been limned in oil with exclusive use of the palette knife, so in place of blended passages of shaded color we find gestures captured in solid hues, paint daubs forming textures that appeal as much to the eye’s sense of touch as its response to pigment. Among the trees in particular, circles abound: petals, leaves, and what optical science calls “circles of confusion,” which are pure orbs of light that has been focused by the pinhole lenses formed in the spaces between opaque tree parts.

Spaced between these rough-hewn, deeply-tinted nature studies, in what qualifies as the Phillips exhibition style of interleaving sympathetic-but-contrasting artists, are small paintings completely unlike those around them. Meticulously drawn and detailed, then brushed in with transparent washes of pale watercolor, rather than focusing on nature, they depict human habitations: specifically life in small and colorful European towns, scenes along streets that the artist has clearly visited and come to know well enough to create these dispatches as testimony to those visits. The only thing they have in common with their companion pieces is the clear, natural light that reveals both having been painted out of doors … as well as testifying to the time of day, the weather, and the activities as well as the appearance of the inhabitants.

I wonder if those viewers would then be surprised to learn that both of these collated collections are by the same artist. Of course there is no agency that polices galleries and discourages an individual artist from acting like two so contrasting painters, but offhand no other example of two completely distinct, yet equal bodies of work—different subjects, mutually exclusive media, tools, and techniques, no everyday economies or characteristics to link them while excluding possible colleagues—comes readily to mind. If someone said that Hadley Rampton has a friend who paints in a way different in every aspect, and who cannot bring herself to show her art, and so has prevailed on her successful and popular friend with a solid gallery connection to take the vocational heat, that dramatic explanation might feel more likely than the truth.

In the watercolors, the presence of so many depth clues, such as the convergence of parallel lines—not that the medieval layout of the streets Rampton enjoys painting are all that parallel—and so forth readily generates the knowledge that what is seen exists in space. It occurs that her reason for producing two such different bodies of work may be that she has two purposes. She knows that traveling with a working painter is a chore, and in order to feel free to indulge herself, she is better off alone. But that denies her the pleasure of sharing the experience of traveling: in this case, primarily to the South of Italy. So these paintings solve a problem of her own creation, allowing her to share what she saw upon her return.

Hadley Rampton, “Ignite,” oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in.

Back at home in the Southwest, something that Rampton finds worth exploring in her oil paintings is how the illusion of depth behaves on what is, after all, a flat plain. Her curiosity accounts for the difference between her approach and the convincing illusion of space within the painting that, for instance, the best Baroque painters mastered. This may even account for her preference for the palette knife, which emphasizes the two-dimensional nature of the painting’s surface. The eye and mind, she knows, are eagerly seeking knowledge of the immediate presence of space, and her goal might be to find the balance point between granting and withholding that satisfaction.

Consider the groves of trees featured in “Ignite” and “Effervescence,” which lack the blending of light and shade that Leonardo da Vinci taught the art world to recognize as characteristic of round objects. Each image contains a similarly flat field of foliage behind those trees, thus making a combination of 2-D designs arranged in a 3-D field. With two eyes we see in depth, but designers have long reveled in their freedom to abstract this space, reducing it to an active, but ultimately flat display. This conundrum calls for sensitivity on the artist’s part if she is to produce works that function as both images and designs. And it calls for a very different way of painting.

Hadley Rampton, “A Passage,” oil on masonite, 20×16 in.

In the gallery, in her new work, there are ample examples of this sort of exploration. In “Aloft,” the sky replaces the trees seen elsewhere. In the desert vistas, various experiments on the theme can be found. The rocks in the stream of “Creek Side II” shift in value with the viewer’s distance from the small panel, but as the scenic illusion is replaced on approach by facts made of paint, the design appropriately provides another entire message for the senses. As the panels get smaller and the application grows proportionately, the results become more, rather than less elaborate. The best example may well be “Cottonwood,” with its lone tree on the flatland and the hills climbing beyond. It makes for an inexplicable Western mandala a viewer can meditate on without ever finding a place where it’s necessary to stop.

Hadley Rampton, Phillips Gallery, Salt Lake City, through June 14.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.