Contributed by P. C. Smith / In a six-decade career, Grace Graupe-Pillard became known as a photo-realist painter of people – her 1986 breakout exhibition was “Urban Life Cutouts” – but in her current show “Burning Point,” also at Hal Bromm, she paints bold near-abstractions that suggest landscapes of destruction. Still using photo-realist methods and starting from news photos, sometimes combining multiple photos, she digitally filters and simplifies them in Photoshop to create complex high-contrast color shapes. She works out the compositions with a computer, at great length, then projects them onto canvas as traced shapes in much the same way she would portraits, but the shapes are larger, bolder, and decisively maintained, painted with smooth edges. Hard-edge work is usually geometric, but the delight of these shapes is their complex organic variety. The drama of her news sources is made explicit in intense color relationships, and high-keyed color keeps shapes separated even when they step chromatically from explosive light to darkness.