Landscape, often imagined as a lyric meditation on the pastoral, is encapsulated in the tondos of Bill Gross as part of the gritty heritage of Chicago. Photographs by Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, and even the abstractions of László Moholy-Nagy are echoed in Bill's paintings.

As someone who looks at the world from an unusual altitude, Bill's vision is perhaps necessarily inclined to the heights. An earlier series, painted from life outside the window of his third story studio, seemed to graze the view at the top of the sash. These scenes were mostly sky, giving nature greater weight than the trappings of civilization, but grounding each long, slim canvas in man-made elements. With an editor's eye, Bill elides the extraneous details and words that contribute to the familiar clutter of the city, refining his vision, and ours. Enabling a long look at what would ordinarily be glimpsed from an elevated train or through the window of a moving car, Bill creates a pause, a moment of stillness in an untenanted downtown that we recognize but do not really know.

The arrows that appear in this cycle of paintings recall the great neon indicators of early twentieth century painting, including works by Fernand Léger, Reginald Marsh and Joseph Stella. First dimmed, the juice that powered that century has been switched off, and in the tondos the arrows point only to themselves.

The tension inherent in these works may arise when marginalized areas are targeted in these images. The tondo, like a bull's-eye, proposes that the whole world is held inside, as in a globe or a crystal ball. The urban fragments pictured here suggest the end of the world, a post-apocalyptic desert. Yet they also suggest the doggedly promoted optimism of the nineteen fifties; a monumental, flanged steel "A" hangs in a cobalt sky above our heads, conveying a more moving patriotism than a hundred waving flags. Confidence and humility are joined in these images; the strength of national purpose, for all its blunders, is met with the irresistible facts of rust and decay. What we long for, when we are caught briefly in nostalgic eddies, is an idealized past of unsullied virtue, and comfort unpricked by the needle of conscience. Bill makes pictures of a more honest memory--memory that includes a kind of rage, pity, and the ultimate kindness of forgetting. These complex emotional hues mix into shades of faded paint, frosted with age, and provide a broader perspective than his tight focus suggests.

These scenes, shown in high, Western daylight, seem benign, even friendly, imbued with the appealing cues of advertising. Yet these same locations seen by night could be threatening, perhaps; certainly suspect. Bill gives us an opportunity to examine where we stand in that landscape in our own time.

Annie Morse is Exhibitions Coordinator at the Hyde Park Art Center. A freelance writer, she also serves as an Adjunct Lecturer at The Art Institute of Chicago.