GALLERY GO 'ROUND

LEARNING THE TRICKS OF THE MASTERS

BY VICTORIA PEDERSEN

Clearly, aesthetics are back in painting. Alive and energized, the medium has become as bullish as the stock market, and Damian Loeb has ridden the crest of the recent wave of publicity. He is a self-taught artist who learned to paint by reading Techniques of the Great Masters of Art, and he clearly picked up a few tricks. Loeb applies transparent glazes to create jewellike colors and builds his paintings from the background forward, sometimes creating an entire landscape that he obscures with characters and scenarios straight out of film noir. He is also the perfect postmodern man, using photographs clipped from movies, magazines, television and books for source material. But the buzz on Loeb is based more on the content of his hyper-realistic paintings than on his technique. These morally ambiguous worlds are filled with an almost clinical sense of foreboding; the threat of violence and a moody sense of dislocation hang over the action. This is a voyeur's paradise, where psychic wounds run deep. Mary Boone, 745 Fifth Ave., through Feb. 12.