Ross Neher’s modest one-person exhibition at the 210 Gallery in Brooklyn reveals something very important about abstract painting: In the best work, there is always more than what initially meets the eye.  Following Neher’s career as a painter for over two decades, I have become increasingly cognizant of the way he grabs something he has actually seen in real time and space and proceeds to refine and/or embellish it as an abstract pictorial theme in multiple variations. In this recent exhibition, he only showed a fraction of the work he did between 2003-2009 based on detailed notations of the walls of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan.

This was not his first encounter with late Renaissance architecture. Neher performed precisely the same procedure during a visit to Umbria in 1997.  On that occasion, Neher saw the magnificent Palazzo di Consoli in Gubbio and immediately commenced a thorough analysis of this architectural monument. He studied every inch of the Palazzo, but from the perspective of an abstract painter, rather than an architect.  In addition to the form, he investigated the light, and the effect of light at various times of the day (not unlike Monet at Rouen).

As for perspective, Neher apparently perceives little distinction between the convergence of lines on a horizon and how the shifting patterns of light alter the manner in which he sees these persistent linear demarcations.  In one way, illusion enters into a synthetic view of the architecture where the light is subtly transformed into contrasting hues, as in Faro (2006), or modular values, as in Dark Sforza (2005) – the latter being an iconic painting that serves to clarify the artist’s intention as he moves between representation and abstract form. In either case, we see canvases divided into an system of beveled rectangles where relatively shallow spaces are placed within the structure of an unequal grid. To achieve the effect of two levels of space, a perspectival illusion is created within the interior framed edges. In addition, the paintings use color and tonality to emphasize the inner and outset aspects of the grid.

By avoiding rhetorical pretensions, Neher takes the concept of abstract geometry to another level. In his kind of painterly phenomenology the abstract picture plane is susceptible to certain limitations ,unless it can be brought back to another form of representation, in which case painting itself becomes the issue.  As revealed in Dark Sforza or in a slightly later square painting, Gray Faro (2007), he seeks to transform abstraction through empirical observations of historical architecture into a kind of imaginative form, thus balancing the illusion of perspective in relation to color modulation and light.

While there is little doubt that his spatial grids have cubic portals of variable dimensions that provide an interesting contrast in relation to the color harmonies, modulations, and contrasts, his approach has virtually nothing to do with Cubism. If anything – upon seeing horizontal rectilinear paintings, such as The Red Zone (2004) or Interlude (for Bridget Riley) (2005) – I would say that there is a certain Mannerist impulse in these works that verges on Expressionism. And yet, it is ultimately no more Expressionism than it is Cubism.  Rather I would read these paintings as a form of optical painting, although one that avoids the trappings of what Victor Vasarely termed the “optical kinetic.” there is nothing superfluous in these paintings, everything counts. But in some cases, the awkward feasibility of the forms resembles a style of Mannerist painting that would finally have their roots in a kind of opticality where the viewer is expected to fill-in the absences within the various interior frames.  This happens largely because the surfaces are somehow never complete. Like Giacometti’s late sculptures, the intensity of the work suggests an unfinished quality. Thus, Neher’s paintings are perpetually transforming themselves in relation to the optical phenomenon of seeing.

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When an artist has decades of hard work and solid accomplishment behind him, his first one-man New York exhibition is particularly momentous. Such is the case with “No Hassle at the Castle,” the New York solo debut of painter Paul Corio. Trained at RISD and Hunter College, Corio maintains close ties to the latter institution’s “color painters” and brings a hard-earned sense of humor and mischief to Josef Albers-derived abstraction rooted in the phenomenology of optical sensation, a branch of contemporary art not exactly known for big laughs.

Across the five-by-five-foot surface of Toga Tiger (acrylic on canvas, 2009) stretches a grid of postage-stamp-sized horizontal rectangles in a limited number of secondary hues. They are separated by strips of a sturdy orange-red about the width of a pencil, and there are a great many gaps in the grid in which the orange-red functions as a ground color. Some of these color chips—blue-green, for example—really pop against this ground, others not so much, and some are so subtle that they are actually less perceptible than the retinal afterimages that form as the viewer scans the painting. As are many of Corio’s paintings, this one is named for a thoroughbred race horse, and according to gallery information the arrangement of colors is derived from the artist’s analysis of results at the Belmont and Aqueduct tracks. Whatever. All you really need to know is right before your eyes.

While Toga Tiger (and its slightly smaller companion piece, El Don Pepe) are based on shifts in hue, Mr. Hi-Hat (2009) is concerned with intensity, saturation. Overlapping disks, striped with a vibrant red and vigorous cerulean blue, drift in a similarly-striped field in which those colors become progressively neutralized—shifted toward gray—until the difference between them is barely perceptible. From a distance (and in photos) the grays take on a greenish cast. It’s a truly weird phenomenon, and quite wonderful. Nine small paintings on panel from 2005 are red/blue, red/green, and orange/green variations on the theme. Each is a zinger, in which Corio’s visual wit is in full effect. While figure (disks) and ground (neutralized murk) are clearly differentiated, each is made of stripes of alternating colors–the ultimate in figure/ground ambiguity.

In the two-foot-square Misterioso (2008), an intertwining circuitry of T and L intersections moves, left to right, through a palette of blue, violet, pink, red, orange, and green; these spectral colors are set against and qualified by a tender, blue-green ground. There are lots of dots. It’s a knockout. Less convincing is MR PC #3, in which the painting’s pixellated treatment resolves into the work’s four-letter title. It recalls stadium scoreboards and transit announcements, but the allusion to commercial graphics seems misplaced, and color relationships take a back seat to issues of linguistic legibility.

The grid organization is canted 45 degrees The Sons of Birdstone, inducing an up-and-down (rather than left-to-right) sense of flow. The surface is covered with hundreds of chevrons made of quarter-inch squares, lemon yellow at the tip, and moving upward through a range of oranges to a full-bore cadmium red before appearing to slide under another, neighboring chevron. The blinking cascade of light the method engenders is utterly absorbing. Sunset Park applies the same approach to a 21-step gray scale, turningBirdstone’s bright-lights-big-city flicker into a smokey, silvery haze. Toward the top of this painting, the darker, upward-pointing peaks inevitably evoke a mountain range in a mist, while below an array of pale points emerges, suggesting fish scales or shingles. The shift in scale is remarkable and, as a sort of rough-cut atmospheric perspective, the perceptual device is plain to see, yet the viewer succombs to its chilly, retinal charms. And he or she might come to believe, as Albers maintained, that the disciplined study of color might beget an emotional response—that the supposedly cool play of chroma opens onto imaginative vistas.

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