Art: Garbage in, paintings out

Twenty-four hours a day, trucks heaped with used cardboard boxes, discarded paper and packaging material rumble into the Rock-Tenn recycling plant near Michael Kareken's painting studio in St. Paul's Midway district. After dumping their rumpled cargoes, they lumber off while workers sort and shuffle the detritus into mountains of processed pulp.

It was an unpromising landscape for a figurative painter looking for a new subject. Yet, there was something about the raw urbanity of it that appealed to Kareken.

"I have always wanted to paint a landscape, but it didn't seem to make sense in a contemporary context," Kareken said recently as he surveyed his new show, "Urban Forest," at Groveland Gallery through Jan. 19.

Kareken's forest consists of 24 paintings, including several 6-foot-wide panoramas, depicting mountains of crushed paper at the Rock-Tenn recycling plant and heaps of rusting steel and crushed metal at the American Iron facility in Minneapolis.

The paintings have a compelling, low-key beauty. They aren't filled with finicky details, nor do they editorialize about society's excesses. They are simply what they are: paintings of trash heaps. Kareken has a keen eye for the play of light on surfaces and the analytical skill to transform his observations into passages of charcoal lit with flashes of lilac, crests of grainy white, bits of gold and flecks of pink.

In "Water Cannon, Rock-Tenn," a heap of paper sags under a blast of water fired to keep it from spontaneously combusting. Kareken turns the water into a gusty blizzard of paint that flares across the canvas, swirls over the trash like snow on an Alpine crag, then rivulets into a slick puddle in the foreground. In "Compressed Oil Drums" he portrays a cluster of irregular, rusty cubes perched in muddy puddles like abandoned Minimalist sculptures. Again his muted palette is surprisingly rich in color, animated by scribbles of pink, rose, coral and blue gray.

As an art student at Maine's Bowdoin College, Kareken was influenced by a professor who dismissed the junk-strewn modern landscape by grumping that the 19th-century French painter Camille Corot "didn't have to deal with rusting tractors." Internalizing that attitude, Kareken turned his back on landscape and honed his talents as a figurative painter, master drawer and print maker while also teaching at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Studying the pinnacles of paper next door, he recognized their similarity to the mountains of his childhood near Tacoma, Wash. There's a gravelly, granite quality to the vertiginous piles of crushed cardboard, and a brooding grandeur in the rusty piles of discarded brakes and crumpled oil drums he found at the American Iron works.

"I grew up surrounded by the Olympic Mountains, the Cascades, and the islands in Puget Sound that are really just the tops of underwater mountains," he said. "And this manmade landscape brought all that back to me. I didn't plan it out as a landscape metaphor; it just sort of took over."