By Ferdinand Protzman
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, March 18, 1999; Page C05

Rocio Rodriguez was on a fellowship in Rome last year when she began wandering around with a sketchpad and pencil, drawing what she saw. For many artists, making a few quick studies of the Eternal City wouldn't be cause for alarm. But to Rodriguez, a committed abstractionist whose works are complex and conceptual, the sudden compulsion to draw the city bordered on sacrilege.

"I hadn't done any life drawing for 20 years, so that was really strange," she says. "Then I was in my room at midnight one night and I found myself drawing decorations I'd seen on buildings and Roman ruins. I was horrified. My work has been abstract since art school and there I was making ornamental designs. I got really concerned about where this was coming from."

A few days later, Rodriguez realized that the answer was Cuba, where she was born in 1952 and lived until the age of 9. The ornamental designs that abound in Rome had evoked memories of the highly decorated Cuban buildings in which she'd lived as a child.

"Once I understood that, I could concentrate on working with the decorative forms, on taking those images apart in my paintings," Rodriguez says. Back home in Atlanta, she began the impressive group of paintings currently on display at Hemphill Fine Arts. The gallery is also showing photographs by Ellen Bennett.

The exhibition, titled "Ambos Mundos," which translates from the Spanish as "Earth Worlds," is visually and intellectually compelling for several reasons. To keep attention on the forms, Rodriguez limited her normally color-filled palette mainly to subdued earth tones such as umber, sienna, brown and black. The paintings also have a sere quality, as if the tropical sun has bleached them.

The ornamental designs she used in paintings such as "Perfect World VI"--mostly intricate floral motifs based on architectural details that are outlined in black oil paint--are symmetrical and pleasing to the eye. Their twists, turns and perfectly shaped leaves are unabashedly frivolous, calling to mind the decorative stone, iron and ceramic works that adorn Latin cities throughout the world.

Yet only the forms on the surface of these multilayered paintings are intact. Beneath and around them are other shapes that have been erased, painted over or corroded in some manner. It's as if time and neglect had worn them down and covered them with a patina of dust to the point where they are barely coherent. In some instances, one can see where Rodriguez painted the same form over and over until reaching a final version.

This repetition, this blurry blending of precise and imprecise imagery, takes the paintings far from the decorative realm. The layering and muzzy images evoke a sense of memory eroded by time's passage and cities slowly crumbling in the tropical sun. Knowing Rodriguez's background, one can't help but think of Cuba's architectural treasures, which are falling into disrepair because of the communist nation's severe economic problems.

But the paintings are not meant as social commentary. The history that Rodriguez is exploring through her repetitive layering technique relates primarily to that particular painting. Through the lens of her personal history, she is exploring the process of creating an abstract painting from a decorative form, the antithesis of abstraction.

"You can't get away from who you are," Rodriguez says. "I'm a Cuban girl seriously in love with American abstract painting. But my art doesn't really connect to Cuban art. The painters who inspire me are Willem de Kooning, Brice Marden, Philip Guston and the other great abstract painters."

The paintings that began with Rodriguez's turn toward the decorative have the same kind of intellectual rigor that the artists who inspired her possessed. They also have an emotional resonance that her idols seldom achieved.

Four Artists at Greenbelt Courthouse

The U.S. District Court in Greenbelt is an odd venue for fine art, since its main function is as a forum for judicial proceedings, particularly bankruptcies. But its four-story atrium offers plenty of wall space and excellent natural light, and over the past five years the Prince George's Arts Council has made good use of them with some interesting group shows by artists from the Washington area. The latest installment is no exception. Curated by Leslie Pelzer, who has put together most of the council's courthouse exhibitions, this show features works by Josh Holland, Preston Sampson, Lee Thomas and Tim Bladen.

Bladen's black-and-white photographs of the people of Southern Maryland are straightforward if uninspired documentation, showing folks at their vocations and avocations. Thomas's acrylic paintings explore African American themes through a carefully painted, slightly surreal style.

But the most interesting work here comes from Sampson and Holland. Sampson, a University of Maryland graduate, is a fine painter who has been building a national reputation in recent years. In 1998 he received a grant from the Prince George's Arts Council that allowed him to make a series of prints at Pyramid Atlantic Workshop in Riverdale.

The monographs and pulp paintings on his own handmade paper are on display at the courthouse and most of them are terrific. The pulp paintings are particularly striking. Sampson's figures are his forte, but the technique--essentially painting with wet paper pulp, then pressing the water out to produce the final image--has given them a plasticity, a three-dimensional quality, that really heightens their presence. "grand dad," for example, seems to be on the verge of movement.

Holland's oil paintings, watercolors and charcoal drawings are more of a retrospective, and it's interesting to track his development. His landscapes from the late 1980s and 1990s are generic, just a cut above paint-by-number compositions. But the paintings and drawings of anonymous people on Washington's sidewalks and in Union Station are very well done, showing a sophisticated sense of composition and use of light. While they don't offer deep psychological insights into his subjects, Holland's pictures catch the myriad individual dramas of city life.

Rocio Rodriguez, Ellen Bennett, at Hemphill Fine Arts, 1027 33rd St. NW, Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m., 202-342-5610, through May 1.

Lee Thomas, Tim Bladen, Preston Sampson, Josh Holland, at U.S. District Court, 6500 Cherrywood Lane, Greenbelt, Monday-Friday, 8 a.m.-4 p.m., through April 16.