In Luc Tuymans, you are never allowed to forget that the source is banal and secondary. Painterliness underscores alienation rather than ameliorating it.

Lewis’s unfailingly authoritative skill for painting real, rich and crystalline light, joined to his muscular composition, is the key to his power and success.

Tauba Auerbach, Daniel Buren, Sol Lewitt, Mike Quinn, and Robin Rhode at Perry Rubenstein Gallery

Given Huang’s indirectness, we experience the scene as if imbued with symbolist forms, which reveal their meaning only fleetingly. Yet the painting does not feel deliberately obscure, but rather poses the question, How much must be revealed before the images makes narrative sense?

Downes paintings reflect a unique combination of aggressive conception and passive elaboration. Fervent perceptions of space enliven their broad outlines; details follow, filling in the story of each site exactly “as is.” Colors add atmosphere and light.

Despite different approaches towards scale, texture and color, a common attitude pervades each artist’s style that isolates a cool tension between involvedness and restraint.

Their biomorphic qualities are undermined by the fabrication process, but this increases the sense of otherness they generate. They suggest imaginary beings that are not the product of fantasy, but rather of imaginative speculation on the real but unknown.

Seeing Double is packed with elaborations of his trademark idiom: imagery transmogrified

Physical gesture means the artist’s hand is present yet transcended: there is no question that the arcs or circles are handmade, but an unforced, lyrical all-overness creates a cosmic, suprapersonal sense of order and well-being.

There is a pervasive ambivalence in Katy Grannan’s portraits: the gaze that returns the viewer’s is a mix of coyness and exhibitionism. The images themselves oscillate between similar extremes, building a visceral sense of the present through precision while succumbing to a remoteness that results from theatricality.