Second helping More treasures at the Virginia Lynch Gallery BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Twenty Years, Part II At the the Virginia Lynch Gallery, 3883 Main Road, Tiverton, through January 18.

Why should an art show, especially a retrospective, be limited by the confines of a gallery’s walls? With Twenty Years, Part II, the Virginia Lynch Gallery gets a second chance, presenting work that there wasn’t room for last summer in the two-decade survey of some 60 alumni. This exhibition revisits some of the high points of the first show and includes additional artists.

While not as strong as the initial selection, this is by no means an assembly of cast-offs. Some nationally prominent names associated with the gallery are here. A scribbled self-portrait by Chuck Close from the prior show is now accompanied by a black-and-white self-portrait print. New Yorker cartoonist Edward Koren wasn’t included the last time, but now we get two pen-and-inks, in his inimitable ragged style, of figures working a garden. David Macaulay’s ironic pastel, "English Landscape," returns with its architectural and geometrical fascination over a farmhouse amidst lush foliage.

Prominence is given to long-time favorites of Lynch. There are numerous pastels by Wolf Kahn of landscapes and calm rural scenes, vitalized by his brisk hand and striking color sensibility. In the upstairs room there are many watercolors by another of her favorite artists, Jules Olitski, who sometimes uses gouache and pastels to add rugged textural elements to moody seascapes.

Still lifes can be rather uneventful in some hands, but not with this assembly of artists. Gretchen Dow Simpson’s "Fruit VIII" is a mass of curves from both an up-close tomato and partially out-of-frame limes but also from light that looks like it came from the edges of drawn shades. In what might as well be a companion piece, "Brimstone" is more than a study of pears by Mimo Gordon Riley; another tight close-up, on a three-foot-wide canvas, the oil painting merges curvilinear sweeps in a golden sunset light that unified foreground, lush subjects, and background.

In this show, there is plenty that similarly takes commonplace subjects and makes them infinitely re-viewable. With the charcoal drawing "Woman Holding Ladder," Daniel Ludwig gives us a study of tonal gradations rather than a nude torso. The woman is lost in shadow except for her face and an arm that angles across a vertical wooden pillar; compositional elements converge to direct us to join her downward gaze. The serene expression, complementing the mood, is a bonus.

A similar concern for composition and expressive tone is sustained in Michael Rich’s abstract paintings "Beneath the Surface," I and II. He combines media — acrylic, charcoal, chalk, pencil, and wax — to fine-tune what he is after. Given the title, in the first of the pair red lines in one area call to mind fish, a grouping counterposed with a pitch-black scrubbing at the bottom right. Swaths of white in the middle distance suggest water reflections and sky. Rich manages to have it both ways, evoking content while maintaining the purely visual satisfactions of abstraction. His "One of Many Mornings" accomplishes the same one-two punch, as green in the background implies a landscape view and yellow glows through rusty brown in the foreground, with blazing white dominating the canvas.

Marc Wholey likes to comment imaginatively on the inadequacy and artifice of frames. In his abstract "Three-Part Harmony," a black portion of the composition spills out over the frame; on the right, the frame is oversized and juts further into the image area. In another painting of his that was not yet hung or accompanied by its title, a colorful geometric abstraction tumbles off the frame at the right, seeming to lift itself away from its penciled under-sketch. Wholey will be having a show here later this year, which will include some of his sculpture.

There is plenty of three-dimensional work as well as paintings and drawings. In this second show, there is room for two artful chairs by John Dunnigan and Timothy Philbrick. In whimsical contrast is Alphonse Mattia’s "Joker’s Chair," with a coyly sleeping face sketched on the back and a big, foreboding yellow button on the seat. Roger Kizik’s "Royce’s Sailing Illustrated" pops off a wall as a 41/2-foot book turned to a page on knots, an amusing visual corollary to the large space that the sport fills for enthusiasts. In an untitled piece, Hugh Townley insets a sheet of plywood with amorphous carved shapes that transcend their pedestrian material. The most elegant sculpture here is "Andrea’s Ring," by Brian Kirkpatrick, carved from elm into a semi-circle that follows the lead of the grain, while using those lines for tension here and there.

It’s a mistake to think of Twenty Years, Part II as an afterthought. There’s even more work from where the rich Virginia Lynch feast has been, and plenty more is in store in the future.