Rackstraw Downes

""Just the facts,"" a phrase much invoked in discussions of Downes' work, is elevated to an aesthetic practice by these three essays and more than 100 plates. Typically producing realistic landscapes painted on decidedly horizontal canvases (some, only as tall as a standard sheet of paper, stretch several feet wide), Downes focuses on freeway overpasses, cement factories, ventilation towers and traffic intersections, but neither these constructions nor the ecological and market critiques they imply are Downes' ""subjects."" Downes is a ""hard-core 'eyeball' realist"" Storr tells us in a thoughtfully elegant essay. Storr's efficient moniker cuts to the quick of Downes' practice: Downes paints by looking deeply; he shuns the assistance of photography and, instead, returns to a site several times during as long as a two- to three-year period to render each scene as faithfully as possible. The goal is not to recreate what can be explicitly seen, but to reveal what can be apprehended only through attention sustained across a vast span of time. In an essay contributed by the artist, Downes describes his process as ""pitting all-out empiricism against habit, memory, formulae, precedent."" As this book shows, Downes makes ""the facts,"" subjective though they may be, beautiful things to see.