The Cruel Fair 2007

Bo Bartlett made *The Cruel Fair*, and it’s painted in a way that everything feels smoothed and modeled, like an egg. The figures are rendered with such detail and precision, but their arrangement feels totally dreamlike, or like something from a stage play. Look at the way the light glazes over the figure in the foreground, how his green shirt almost blends into the yellowed grass. It’s a study in contrasts: the smooth skin against the rough texture of the field, the flatness of the sky against the three-dimensional figures. The artist's touch is almost invisible. And that gives the whole scene this feeling of being both hyper-real and totally staged, like a memory that's been polished and perfected over time. There is something of Wyeth in Bartlett’s work, but here he has taken a surrealist turn. It's like he's inviting us to piece together a story, but one that resists any easy answers. Art offers us a place for ambiguity, right?