While the title of Nick Lamia’s third solo show with Jason McCoy, “Cloud, Mountain, Valley, Sea,” recalls similarly landscape-layered titles from the likes of Milton Avery and Helen Frankenthaler – neither an alien presence in Lamia’s environmental abstraction – the four loci identified are specifically steps of the water cycle. A sailing instructor in his youth (counting family members of painter John Walker among his students) Lamia is passionately connected in his understanding of them to nature and ecology. “Even time is no match for thirst,” he writes in the gallery press release. “No matter the era in which one lives, the need for water links us all as humans.” The exhibition brings together paintings, large-scale works on paper and an installation. Managing simultaneously to suggest aerial and cross sectional views, his imagery is at once translucent and hard-edged, mining geometric and organic form with the deftness of a sailor negotiating currents of water and wind. DAVID COHEN
Pictured here: Untitled, 2016, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 84 inches
Jason McCoy Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, 11th floor, at Madison Aveue, jasonmccoyinc.com