For his new exhibit at the Schanz Gallery, we find Todd Scalise in the middle of his artistic passage. Scalise uses commonplace, even mundane themes, such as images from TV, often combining them with riffs from Tintoretto, a vestige of the year and a half he spent studying painting in Italy.

Todd puts his paintings together by combining a wide range of images and then experiments with texture, color, and line. Which means he is constantly playing with the way paint goes on surfaces, and the way conventional imagery, from religious symbolism to stills from science fiction movies, morphs under the scrub and dash of his brush, or dissolves under layers of wash and spray, to become panels in a storyboard, the narrative line of which he has yet to figure out, but which he assumes is in there someplace. Scalise pores through that arrangeability, moving around images and icons, trying to put the puzzle together, knowing they fit and that, if he lines them up right, it may all become clear.

Scalise has evaded the trap that has ensnared a couple of generations of American artists who sifted through the arcana of our culture, trying to make sense of it when they knew that not only does it not make sense, but that the interpretation they were trying to impose on it was merely condemnation of it. But what they revealed was their own narcissistic navel-gazing. Images of movie stars and Oldsmobile ads, no matter how contemptuously juxtaposed, became subjects of reverence. And Scalise, in a disarmingly innocent way, has avoided all of this.