“I  try to imagine what it would be like  to open your eyes to the physical world for the first time, not with the immature mind of an infant, but with a fully developed consciousness,” says the Virginia-born painter MG deButts. “Color, movement and random energy agitating against the vertical and horizontal planes would be a stunning assault on the senses. Everything interconnected and yet singular. Most of all human faces would seem inscrutable, ­- fraught with both expectancy and judgment.”
   The visionary sense of wonder that deButts strives for comes across strongly in her oils on canvas, on view at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from December 7 through 27. (Reception December 7, 6 to 8 PM.)
   On one level, the subjects that deButts chooses to paint are as domestic as those of Fairfield Porter. Adults and children are seen in pleasant, presumably upper middle class settings, at ease on grass lawns and in gardens, amid all the trappings of an affluent suburban lifestyle. Yet color is heightened and the commonplace becomes exotic, as though familiar scenes have suddenly become as exotic to the artist as Gauguin's first impressions of Tahiti. Indeed, deButts shares with that great post Impressionist a love of resonant color and fluid form that invests her canvases with a sense of energy and life. Although her figures are as anatomically accurate as those of any realist, they are invariably  defined by bold, colorful outlines that resemble auras. One gets the sense  that deButts is seeing through exterior appearances to the spiritual essence of each person that she paints.
   Thus while the little girl standing in the backyard swimming pool in deButts' oil on canvas “Agua” is wearing a Mousketeer cap with ears and appears on one level as casual as any kid captured at play in a candid snapshot, she is also as much of a formal and symbolic entity as a figure in a religious icon. And the same can be said of the two boys in the foreground, one holding a garden hose, or the child romping with a butterfly net in the distance. Enveloped in their bright individual auras, each figure seems to signify the sacredness of existence ­­as though the artist truly is opening her eyes to the physical world for the first time and sharing her heightened vision with the viewer.
   Conversely, the painting called “Comprehension,” appears to convey the same idea from the perspective of the “seer,” its composition dominated by close-up views of three babies who stare out at the viewer with what appears to be wide-eyed astonishment. Here, the thick outlines around the figures, along with deButts' characteristically bright, flat color areas, create a kind of Pop effect akin to that in the early paintings of Tom Wesselman.
   However, while deButts' figures are just as emblematic as those of the Pop artist,
they possess a spiritual presence, which comes across with special force in canvases such “Kate's Duck,” in which a child and her toy loom monolithically in an enchanted garden, and “Suzan and Henry,” a double portrait where a mother and child share the same golden aura.

-- Maureen Flynn