Stark Landscapes From Tashkent

Contemporary painters from Tashkent at Davidson Galleries, 313 Occidental Ave. S. through Aug. 31, with recent paintings by Paul D. Natkin, Tues.-Sat. 11-5:30, Sun. 1-5, 624-7684.

A major city drains a distant water source for its needs, leaving behind an encrusted wasteland. Mono Lake, Calif.? No, the city is Moscow, the body of water is the landlocked Aral Sea, and the people of Uzbekistan are those suffering from drastic environmental changes.

Not surprisingly, several of the Tashkent artists displaying at Davidson Galleries this month depict their Uzbek homeland dried and cracking beneath the sun. The symbolism is both most powerful and most obscure in ``Road,'' an oil painting by Jamal Usmanov. A weary milk cow, now used as if she were an ox, drags a load of bare tree limbs from which hang wisps of string.

The painting overflows with despair. The udder of the cow is full but untended, for she must stagger onward, hauling trees that once were the pride and mystical hope of the region - people tied strings to their branches to bring good luck. At 29, Usmanov has spent a youth aware of lost innocence.

In ``Noon,'' Usmanov reveals a mountainous landscape with two pairs of empty shoes arranged in the foreground, a still life with a strongly implied human presence. It is the hour of prayer for the devout of Islam, when they remove footwear and kneel to the East. The sun beats down on the scene, flattening perspective.

Across the gallery hangs another painting called ``Noon,'' a 1980 tempera of a small village by Marat Sadykov. The bare white walls glisten with heat; the only human figure is escaping for the shade of an interior. Just a few feet away hangs the 1975 oil ``Midday'' by Vladimir Chub. In this - a near abstraction - the walls of a town glow in molten red and yellow, while a few trees offer cool pools of blued green.

With the enamels of Viktor Rudakov, the viewer is propelled into the heart of the sun. ``Disks'' is a triptych in which sharply incised circles of yellow emerge from wild coronas. Magical pyramids outline each blast furnace of color. The artist, born in 1955, has a breathless grasp of cosmology.

Parts of their land may now resemble a moonscape, but the Uzbekis continue to treasure the fertility of their culture. In the work of Akmal Nuritkinov, one sees figures from Scheherazade come to life. The long, expressive line of Modigliani echoes from ``Courtship,'' but the young man with the rooster peeking from his shirt, and the woman with her head tilted to the sky as she holds a pomegranate, are the stuff of legend.

In the upstairs gallery room, Seattle artist Paul D. Natkin presents his view of a global reality. Each of his acrylic paintings on canvas is composed of hundreds of tiny squares; in many of the squares Natkin has drawn a symbol from one of the world's alphabets. A flower at the center of each painting is a reminder that ``regardless of culture, we human beings belong to a single species with its origin in nature,'' according to the artist - a statement linking Natkin to the artists of Seattle's sister city, Tashkent.