As Moore explains, while the paintings aren't always topographically accurate, "Everything is true, or could be true, or has been true." This is the kind of painting one can savor, that speaks to a convergence of admirable technical proficiency and acute conceptual intelligence.
The paintings in "Thirteen Miles" mostly involve Coatesville, a once-bustling steel town in Chester County a few miles west of the last stop on SEPTA's R-5 line. In its heyday, industry supported 10,000 factory jobs; today that workforce has shrunk to about 1,000.
The exhibition title is literal; Coatesville is about 13 miles east of the village of Paradise, near Lancaster.
When steel was king, Coatesville might have been paradise for working-class families. As Moore's paintings reveal, today the workers' paradise is mainly a memory that he evokes through a skeletal building in the painting Winter Light and the smokeless stacks of Sunday Evening: Summer.
"Thirteen Miles" is a compact, elegiac show of only 16 paintings built around four large pictures that Moore completed last year and early this year.
These four, themed to the seasons, summarize his response to Coatesville then and now, both as a picturesque industrial motif and as a prime example of how economic evolution has transformed the American landscape.
The artist's affinity for such landscapes dates to his childhood in St. Louis, where he lived near similar environments. He discovered Coatesville in 1986, when he visited a retrospective exhibition for the precisionist painter Ralston Crawford at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
