Darkly mysterious or floodlit, Emma Webster’s new landscape paintings at Petzel Gallery are an uncanny blend of realistic elements and digitally abstracted forms. This painting’s title, ‘Wasatch,’ suggests a location in the western Rocky Mountains, but while the birch trees in the foreground are identifiable, they’re surrounded by flat, undetailed saplings and strange, shadowy terrain in the back left that belongs to a digital world. Multiple light sources which cast a variety of shadows and the appearance of a rearing bull place the painting in the realm of fantasy, creating an intriguing blend of possible permutations between real and imagined worlds. (On view in Chelsea through June 6th.)
