Painting: New Old Masters

What’s the very latest flight of fancy on Manhattan’s fluttery gallery row? Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. Rembrandt’s The Night Watch? That’s right, along with Titian, Fragonard and Van Dyck. As portrayed by John Clem Clarke, 30, a former football hero from Oregon State, these are old masters with a new twist. For his first show, which opened at Manhattan’s Kornblee Gallery last week, Clarke projected color slides of famous paintings onto large sheets of heavy paper, then clipped out stencils of their shapes, then sprayed layers of paint through them onto a canvas in luscious, simplified color arrangements.

Clarke’s technique is similar to Andy Warhol’s photographic silk-screen caricatures in that it is based on elementary colors laid one atop another. But unlike Warhol, Clarke actually seems tp like colors that harmonize, and he keeps them in tune. The silky gown of Charpentier’s Mile. Charlotte is reduced to four shades of grey, but they balance precisely. Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People becomes a tatterdemalion tapestry of rich reds, browns, rusts and golds, a country mile closer to paisley than pop. Clarke’s new old masters are selling fast. Of 16 in the gallery, nine have already been spoken for at prices ranging from $600 to $1,200. Conceivably, pretty pictures are coming back into style. Then again, maybe they were never out.