Solvang’s Elverhøj Museum | Visions in the Rearview, in Between Times

Being that we instinctively tote along expectations and predigested ideas to cultural events and art exhibitions, a certain taste for travelog flavorings comes naturally when visiting a show titled Looking Back: Tokyo, Gibraltar, Berlin & Sperlonga, now on view at Solvang’s Elverhøj Museum. We quickly bump into the “think again” response upon entering the gallery space.

Glen Rubsamen’s paintings deftly dodge any standard mode of conduct in terms of bringing an outsider’s (and/or tourist’s) curious eye in a locale far from home. Instead, he paints odes to the between hours, with ample attention paid to twilight skies fringed with silhouetted trees and spare evidence of man-made objects and structures.

He brings a strict, even minimalist, conceptual strategy to this series. Specific differences between Berlin and Tokyo would be detectable only by a highly attentive local; to most of us, these are paintings about sky and shadowy framing, with a universal reference.

Adding to the hypnotic detachment of this body of work is the fact that the canvases hail from an earlier period of the artist’s life, when he was an itinerant thirtysomething in the 1990s. They are literally paintings from another time, and from some liminal space, like the mystical between zone of consciousness between waking and sleeping life.

Enticement comes in surprising and presumably everyday ways in this art. The painting “Gakugaidaigaku” features two thick tree trunks as visual protagonists set against a gray-blue sky and with a tilted slip of a bridge in the lower right corner.

The most prominent architectural presence in the show arrives as the multi-story building in “Gibraltar VIII,” which seems almost out of place — and out of pace — with the series. The building, an unpeopled megastructure by the sea, is viewed behind a gathering of trees and a high cliff to the right, which seems to vie for our attention as much as the building before us.

In another variation on the show’s fairly uniform pictorial scheme, a rhythmic grid is imposed on the seaside scene in “Grimma,” with a row of trees in a procession across the composition — and, natch, stripped of specifics by the silhouetting shade effect.

“Puerta de Tierra” is accounted for in the form of a yawning sky and palm trees in the outer margins. A faux castle turret, which would be a prominent feature in a more traditional travelog-friendly painting, is almost as a footnote compared to the mundane drama of a streetlight, with structures looming like emaciated cranes into the center of the picture.

Paradoxically, the enigmatic allure whets your appetite to go there, even though there is no strong “there there,” to quote Gertrude Stein. Rubsamen has stirred up some special magic and atmospheric mojo with this art — ostensibly about the outside world, but in fact, peering inward in its particular fashion.

Looking Back: Tokyo, Gibraltar, Berlin & Sperlonga is on exhibit through November 18 at Elverhøj Museum of History & Art, 1624 Elverhoy Way, Solvang. See elverhoj.org.