'Breakthrough' brings up-and-coming artists together

Just call it the power of six.

Taken individually, the half-dozen artists in the Fresno Art Museum's terrific new exhibition "Breakthrough" could mount a respectable individual show on his or her own. From Julia Woli Scott's intriguing cotton-bleached palette in her series of paintings of "mental landscapes" to Terrance Reimer's gorgeously saturated photographs of an "everyday" Central Valley that through his eyes is anything but, there's a vitality and vigor that in each of six cases stands on its own.

Yet this group exhibition truly is an example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Taken together, the work of the "Breakthrough" artists is somehow amped up in terms of its collective crackle.

It helps that curator Linda Cano, the museum's director, didn't rely on elaborate contortions in terms of theme in trying to tie together these distinctive bodies of work. Unlike, say, the museum's recent "Edges" group show -- which featured fine work from seasoned artists but felt a little strained as the curator shoehorned that work into what I felt was a mostly meaningless theme -- this "Breakthrough" exhibition feels different.

In the show, there are two simple common threads running through the work of Reimer, Scott, Leslie Batty, Caleb Duarte, Laura Goldstone and Nigel Robertson. The first is geographical. All have called the Valley home at one time or another.

The second is more subjective: the idea of potential. Cano selected these six as examples of artists whom she feels have the possibilities of great things ahead of them.

Those are the easy connections for a viewer of the show to absorb. But to me, there's something deeper to excavate. In all six, there is an energy, a honed and crafted passion, for viewing the world in a sharp and distinctive way.

This doesn't mean a collection of six artists' statements bogged down by the often bloated verbiage so closely associated with "important" art. In fact, Robertson -- whose training included traditional painting methods at the Florence Academy of Art -- goes so far in his own statement to declare: "I feel I have nothing more to say. ... I don't use art to complain about the world's problems anymore. My paintings are simply the appreciation of nature, light and shadow."

But though Robertson doesn't want to intellectualize his art, he does have something to share in his plein air works painted at locales ranging from Yosemite to Tuscany. He writes: "Every place I paint, I fall in love with for the duration of the painting. Sometimes it's days, sometimes it's minutes. It is the appreciation of our world that we inhabit."

He might have nothing to "say," but like his fellow artists in "Breakthrough," he has a distinctive voice. His small-scale, intense landscapes -- which include beautiful frames he made himself -- have a spontaneity and immediacy that shine through. That in itself speaks volumes.

Batty's work, meanwhile, offers much more overt messages than Robertson's. In her large-scale paintings, Batty explores feminine identity, often through the metaphors of dress making, fairy-tale figures and art-history references. (I love her huge "Casting Fairytales," which updates Velasquez's famous work "Las Meninas" with such modern touches as a big-screen TV.)

There's an intensely personal bent to some of her work as well. Batty is a breast-cancer survivor, which informs some of her most powerful paintings. In a large oil and acrylic work titled "Flesh No. 6," a formal-style strapless ball gown is draped on a headless mannequin. From the waist down, the extravagant dress billows out of the frame, but the form-fitting top conspicuously highlights the mannequin's breasts.