The only pleasure I’ve ever gotten out of urban sprawl is Robert Walden’s pen-and-ink drawings, which he calls “ontological road maps.” Only an obsessive could make the fictive mazes of nodes, meandering roads and dead ends at Marcia Wood Gallery. The lines are no wider than a pinpoint, denser in the center and falling off as they spread outward toward their precipitous end.

The New York artist calls them, with a touch of irony, “New World city grids.” They are also metaphors for the unruliness and illogic of life.

Through Sept. 6, 2003

©2003 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution