Shirley Rabe Masinter's paintings of New Orleans cityscapes are ...

Critic Doug MacCash rates New Orleans art exhibits. The ratings are Wonderful, Worthwhile and Whatever. Shirley Rabe Masinter?s exhibit of photo-realist cityscapes titled ?Made in Louisiana,? on display at LeMieux Galleries, 332 Julia St. is Wonderful.

Shirley Rabe Masinter?s exquisite exhibition ?Made in Louisiana? is a hypnotic tour of the ragged edge of the New Orleans cityscape. The suite of ultra-realistic oil paintings, watercolors and pencil drawings depicts long-abandoned storefronts, bars and other neighborhood businesses in visually luscious states of deterioration.

Masinter lovingly reproduces the nuances of peeling paint, loosening clapboards, haphazard graffiti scrawl and corrosion as if they were fields of wildflowers rather than a blight on bygone landmarks such as the St. Rock Market and the Circle Grocery. There?s something inexplicably compelling about urban grit, and nobody captures it better than Masinter.

There may be a murmur of nostalgia in the scenes of once-vital, now-moribund businesses, but Masinter deals with her subjects with such cool, clinical observation that sentimentality is never part of the picture. In fact, the opposite is true.

Masinter?s images, which rarely include humans or much evidence of urban bustle, exude the inescapable entropy and loneliness of a ghost town. ?Green Chair? is an example of a haunting exercise in color harmony and existential emptiness.

Masinter masterfully emphasizes the vacuum-like stillness in her cityscapes by locking them together with tight geometry. Search the exhibit for a painting of a Marigny-style pink house bisected with a telephone pole that bears a sign that reads ?Narrow Street.?

Notice how the pole so perfectly splits the dormer that none of the adjoining shapes seems capable of shifting one way or the other. That may be romantic 19th-century architecture on the surface, but it?s hard-as-nails modernist composition underneath. Again and again,as you wander the show, you?ll find blizzards of lavish detail frozen in the grasp of similar crystal-like geometry.

Brush in hand, Masinter, 79, is both a scientist and magician. She uses a camera and sketchpad to rigorously document the details of her street scenes, then hand-draws the compositions in her studio, taking color and design liberties as she goes. Finally she begins the laborious painting process, which can take weeks per canvas.

City-dwellers may have glanced at the same examples of architectural decay and economic flux a thousand times, yet Masinter gives the scenes new resonance. Though her paintings are, on one hand, exercises in dead-pan analysis, they also have a difficult-to-define metaphysical quality. In a world of artistic overkill, Masinter?s work reminds us that sometimes visual truth is stranger than visual fiction.

Prices are $1,300 to $32,000. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Call 504.522.5988. Exhibit continues through May 26.

Doug MacCash can be reached at dmaccash@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3481. Read more art news at nola.com/arts. Follow him at twitter.com/DougMacCashTP.

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