Front Row

February 1, 2000

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

For an artist, fashion is pomp and people-watching circumstance.

Happily, some people admit to enjoying fashion shows more for the pomp and people-watching than the viewing of unwearable clothes. Among the honest is the painter Damian Loeb, who plans to see as many shows as his fashion photographer friends invite him to this season.

Mr. Loeb lives at the nexus of art and fashion. His current show, at the Mary Boone Gallery on Fifth Avenue, relates a narrative of sex, solitude and death in the manner of the dramatized, hyper-realist fashion photography so in vogue now. One of that genre's favored practitioners, Taryn Simon, is a good friend of Mr. Loeb. The painter is now working on a canvas based on a Mario Sorrenti photograph that appeared in W.

"The vocabulary I use has to reflect the people I'm trying to communicate with," he said in his TriBeCa apartment and studio last week.

A Loeb house guest not too long ago happened to be Alexander McQueen. For a time, Mr. Loeb dated a McQueen assistant. After Mr. McQueen left his Burberry scarf at the apartment, the recognizable plaid turned up in a skirt in one of Mr. Loeb's paintings now on view at Mary Boone. Burberry was so thrilled that a company spokesman invited Mr. Loeb, generally a wearer of thrift-shop sweaters, to visit its uptown showroom and pick out some new clothes.

Burberry, though, doesn't seem as well versed in the world of art as Mr. Loeb is in the world of fashion. A faxed statement from a company spokeswoman about Mr. Loeb's painting said, "Burberry is clearly hip again, and to have the young and talented Damien Hirst think of us simply reinforces that the company is moving in the right direction-forward!"

The formaldehyde-loving Mr. Hirst and Mr. Loeb do at least share the same gallery in London.