By Paul Varnell

Contributing writer

The Addington Gallery’s modest show of recent still-life paintings by Chicago artist Susan Kraut is as beautiful an exhibit as Chicago has seen all year.

The 12 paintings, each titled “Italian Still Life” with a distinguishing Roman numeral, all consist of a still life arrangement of red and orange fruits and berries—persimmons, cherries, pears, pomegranates—and a few green leaves carefully arranged on a window ledge that looks out at a darker-toned blue and green landscape with mountains or a lake in the background.

Given their similar material the paintings constitute variations on a single theme. But as listeners familiar with Bach or Mozart know, strikingly different results can be wrought from a single theme.

The paintings derive from Kraut’s stay a few years ago in Bellagio, overlooking Lake Como in northern Italy. But unlike a previous group of paintings in which Kraut rendered the scenes more or less literally, the current paintings include more flexible recreations drawn from memory, combining elements that were not originally present at the same time or place. That also accounts for the different landscape backgrounds seen in the paintings

The painters of the classic 17th century Dutch still-life tradition similarly combined elements from different times—including in one vase, for instance, flowers that bloomed at different times of the year.

The paintings vary considerably in size, from 12 inches by 18 inches up to 30 inches by 36 inches and contain varying numbers of fruits and leaves—anywhere from four to twelve elements. Unlike the Dutch still-lifes, which could become quite crowded, however, Kraut keeps each painting simple and uncluttered, allowing each element to make its own contribution.

The largest of the paintings, “Italian Still Life” XVI, combines two pears, a single persimmon (the tomato-like fruit on the right), a pomegranate (in the right foreground), two sprigs of a berry bush inserted in a glass vase half-filled with water, three berries lying on the window ledge and two leaves that are detached from a branch and beginning to curl up.

As in all the paintings Kraut gives careful attention to the play of light on the fruits and the shadows they cast. The shadows are almost equal actors in the quiet drama of the paintings. In XVI, for instance, the stems of the berries at the lower left and right do not cast quite the shadows you would expect, and one of the four leaves attached to a pear seems to cast no visible shadow at all.

The painting also offers a reiterated doubleness: two pears, two sprigs with berries, two detached leaves. But there is more: There are two mountains in the background landscape and two shadowy cypress trees on the far right that seem to echo faintly the two sprigs of berry bushes on the left. It is also worth noticing how the landscape seems to slope downward from left to right, and how the foreground fruits are arranged to echo that movement.

Many of these same features are evident in Kraut’s other paintings. But the differences are important too. Occasionally there is a flower as well as fruit. The two pears in number XXI are bright yellow, a color rare in the other paintings. The prominent cypress trees on the left and right sides in number XV are strong vertical elements played against the ever-present horizontal window ledge and narrower ledges above. And, of course, the background changes from painting to painting—sometimes clearer and richer in detail, sometimes less distinct—even though they all are supposedly based on a view out the same window.

The Dutch still-life painters often included even among their most opulent creations, unobtrusive reminders that human life is finite and all nature subject to decay. Kraut allows the object in her paintings to remind us of this too. The fruit are not all perfectly ripe nor the leaves pristine. As Kraut points out, the paintings show “the fragility and impending decay of the once-perfect fruits, the rotten spots that have begun appearing on the pears, the berries beginning to shrivel, the leaves starting to wither.”

These details are worth pointing out to keep viewers from just glancing at the paintings, thinking, “How nice,” and moving on. There is more here than is apparent in the initial glance. Kraut says specifically that part of her purpose is to get viewers to slow down. She wants her paintings to be “meditative and contemplative, because everything in our daily lives is so fast. My goal is to create something that just slows you down and gets you to really look at the world.”

Looking at the world is key for Kraut, who admits, “If I can paint something and it looks real, such as capturing the exact quality of light as it falls on the skin of a pear, I’m thrilled. I think that’s the reason I’ve never had any inclination not to paint from real life. I have to see it in the world and then I fall in love with it and then I paint it.”

Writing of her students at the Art Institute of Chicago, Kraut perhaps speaks as much of herself when she says, “Through all the shifts and fashions which come and go in the art world, I have found there are always students who want to learn how to paint and draw the world around them, who are passionate about looking at the world and learning how to use paint to represent how they see it.”

“Susan Kraut: New Paintings,” at the Addington Gallery, 704 N. Wells, on view through Jan. 31, 2008. Hours: Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Closed Christmas week. For information call (312) 664-3406.