Robert Sussman’s show at Cue Art Foundation breathes the same Chelsea air as that of his esteemed predecessor Willem de Kooning at Gagosian. I visited the latter just before the former. Unfair perhaps, comparing the two seems nonetheless profitable; viewing Sussman next to De Kooning allows one to see more clearly the contemporary twists in Sussman’s content. The comparison is also fitting because Sussman cites the Abstract Expressionists as his primary influence claiming, like those artists, to “favor experience over conceptualization.” This chunk of the artist’s statement, surely apt as far as the abstract expressionists are concerned seems less well suited to Sussman’s paintings.

Sussman, like his exhibition’s curator, Thomas Nozkowski, favors small paintings. This small scale lends itself to a more retiring contemplation of the art than the Abstract Expressionists tended to provide. Prompted by the artist’s focus on certain forms, I find myself viewing his paintings as one might a puzzle, dissecting them for intersecting meanings. The calligraphic curly-cue, reminiscent of cartooning, repeats itself throughout the paintings on display at Cue, as does Sussman’s use of rectilinear constructs of solids and voids. He plays washy trapezoids against hazy yet colorful grounds. He has a tendency to centralize his compositions like icons while his employ of the diptych consistently emphasizes horizontality. The paintings seem schematized at times. Take, for example, untitled #2, in which the right hand panel is a stark black that severs the landscape-like composition on the left. Such a black in such a context does not seem experiential. It seems instead to derive from some concept of experience as interrupted or fragmented. Much of Sussman’s color functions as does this black.

De Kooning always uses naturalistic color grounded in sensory experience no matter how intense the hue. His paintings from the 60’s and 70’s are relentlessly atmospheric – color speaks always of observed phenomena. Brushstrokes swim outward, suggesting space far beyond that contained by the picture plane. These paintings do not repeat form with the exception of the brushstroke itself, the lowest common denominator of content in de Kooning’s work.

Sussman might find a more apt lineage in other abstract expressionists, such as Barnett Newman or Clyfford Still, whose insistence on certain compositional devices mirrors more closely his own. Yet both of these artists use scale to force viewers into awareness of themselves bodily in relationship to the paintings. To look at their larger paintings, one must literally pace the length of the room, close to see the surface, far to contemplate the whole. You’re meant to lose yourself in the abstract expressionist’s colors, to have an experience of your own. Before a Sussman, one stands at several paces, physically tranquil. It’s the mind and the eye that do the work. Sussman’s easy, inventive way with paint appears driven by a far more cerebral core than the artist is willing to admit. Rather than favoring experience over concept, Sussman’s lush and intellectual paintings reveal the pitfall’s of such dichotomies.

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January 29 – March 6, 2004

David Storey is one of the few formalist painters I can think of who hasn’t replaced inventiveness with monotony. Any painter who invents forms might inevitably fall prey to illusionism, but not so Storey. Although recognizable shapes appear in a few of these paintings (horses, owls, arrows), he builds his imaginary worlds using a private idiom. Storey has lovingly and obsessively recycled his private signs and symbols through the years. The individual components of these busy but clearly delineated compositions remind us of many things, but at the same time they are autonomous.

The experience of looking at these paintings is the opposite of cloud gazing, where you find yourself searching for one referent after another. The commonly-heard criticisms of abstract art-that it fetishizes and distorts the human figure, transforms everything into a phallic symbol, is onanistic and subjective, hides the artist’s lack of technical skills-don’t apply to this work. Storey is so concerned with formal qualities his imaginary shapes look the way they do because of their relationship to other parts of the composition. But at the same time they are not cut off from the external world or the history of art. This is what makes his work enigmatic.

These paintings are flat. The tightly interlocking planes of bright color suggest psychological states instead of specific physical spaces but first and foremost they serve the overall design. Storey incorporates a number of subtleties into each canvas. Dripped paint, loose brushwork, and evidence of previous states of the painting appear amidst flat areas of color, but are made prominent by their scarcity. Painted black lines outline most of the shapes in these paintings, but some of the painted lines are done with colors we find in other areas of the painting. This makes the pictorial space more complicated than it would be if Storey simply painted black lines in front of colors that suggested deep space. Also, the black lines outline areas of color, but some colored shapes have no outline at all, and most of the time the colors are not enclosed by the lines and spread beyond them. The patchwork of bright intense colors and the linear structures interact but have a separate existence. The variety of marks simulates textural variation.

“The Age of Brass,” (2003), is a perfect example of what Storey can do with the oval and the square. This busy painting is a mosaic of sorts. Storey, not unlike Picabia in his imaginary machine paintings, makes the viewer feel comfortable in a world of rather anonymous shapes. However, Storey’s paintings are machines that produce what Clement Greenberg called “plastic sight.” There is something brave and incorrigible about Storey’s reuse of shapes, the circle within circle, the lozenge, rectangles, elongated boomerang shapes, Miróesque mustachios, and squiggles. Stuart Davis reused shapes and never failed to be inventive. His brightly colored squiggles activated the whole frame, and even when Davis introduced recognizable shapes into the mix, fire hydrants, figures, architecture, his canvases always maintained a militant flatness and a strong sense of movement and design. Storey is interested in what Greenberg called the “decorative and narrative complications of line.” The horses that appear in “Sol Invictus,” (2002), are as mechanical and iconic as the figures that appear in Davis’ work. However, Storey’s work depends very little on observation of the exterior world.

In “Adorama,” (2003), a masterpiece in my opinion, Storey divides the canvas between cool blues, browns and greens and hot oranges and reds. Then he puts flashes of hot yellow and orange in the cool half and blue and green shapes in the hot half. The interplay between hot and cool colors and the dividing and subdividing of pictorial space energizes these canvases. Storey’s obscurity does not frustrate the viewer because of the satisfying formal qualities of the work. His compositions are precarious balancing acts. The placement of color and line is dependent upon the artist’s intuitive sense of balance. These canvases have been worked on for a long time and the clarity of the imagery is a product of this slow moving contemplative process.

“The Silver Spear,” (2003), “Venus & Mars,” (1990), and “Kentaurennamen,” (2004), contain masculine and feminine personas. Storey’s pictorial structures evoke different subjects, but the inventive treatment of form is paramount. His paintings are constructed worlds that have their own independent existence. The outside world is recreated in a completely new form. Storey’s slow, unhurried and steady brushstrokes create an interesting tension between control and expression. He shows us that painters can pursue their formalist interests and not sacrifice invention and the imagination.

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“Jeremy Blake: Autumn Almanac” at Feigen Contemporary through December 20 (535 W 20 Street, between 10 and 11th Aves, 212 929 0500)

“Aristides Logothetis: Speculative Grammar” at Cue Art Foundation through January 24 (511 W 25 Street, between 10 and 11 Aves, 212-206-3583)

“Augusto Arbizo: Rise and Fall” at Polytechnic at Michael Steinberg Fine Art through December 23 (526 W 26 Street 9F (between 10 and 11th Aves, 212 924 5770)

“Urban Baroque” is an astute, focused four-person show at Plane Space, the handsome, year old West Village gallery. London-based curator Lisa Ivorian Gray has brought together three established young Brits, Ian Dawson, Anya Gallaccio and Steve McQueen, and an emerging American, Drew Lowenstein, in a refreshing, intelligent mix.

While the title has a good ring to it, the use of the word Baroque doesn’t bear too close scrutiny. It ought to connote emotional excess, knowing rule subversion, and theatrical directness. Roman bells and smells can also help. The artist who best most evokes this last attribute is Ms. Gallaccio. She has been active on the London scene since the 1980s and has devoted her career, to the best of my knowledge, to a single idea. Luckily, it’s a cute one: She arranges fresh cut flowers in a modernist grid under a sheet of thick glass, either on the floor or, as on this occasion, on the wall, and leaves them, over the course of an exhibition, to their inevitable, inexorable decay.

Mr. McQueen is a Turner Prize winner and video artist of subtlety and depth. Alas, his somewhat slight contribution here conforms to a stereotypical (think Damien Hirst) view of young British art: pristinely executed renderings of vague nastiness. The seven C-prints sealed within plexi that capture rolled up rags rotting in gutters are hardly Carravaggio. On the other hand, Mr. McQueen and Ms. Gallacio set a tone of slick rot which the other two artists extend in more suggestive ways.

The juxtaposition of Mr. Dawson’s enigmatic sculptures and Mr. Lowenstein’s graffiti- and Sci-Fi-inspired lyrical abstraction is what makes this show worth the journey. Mr. Dawson, who was given a solo exhibition this summer at Chelsea’s James Cohan Gallery, subjects found plastic industrial containers to the blow torch to produce weird contortions, a kind of postmodernized Arp. The sense of nature reclaiming artifice with avengance connects with the flowers and rags, but Mr. Dawson’s rich, ambiguous work is more individual and laive than his copatriots’. His sculpture has just the right mix of banality and otherness.

Drew Lowenstein is genuinely Baroque in his collision of salon abstraction and street attitude. He favors raw canvas and seemingly arbitrary stains for his grounds and a highly developed calligraphy (plus occasional bursts of cartooning and graffiti) for his figure. His mark-making is at once fastidious, fiddly, expressive and aloof. It looks as if he has mastered some lost semitic script, and like Islamic or Jewish micrographers, who arrange text into motifs or geometric patterns, he has his marks accumulate into vaguely depictive forms: In his case, what could read as space ships or ancient cities are poised on the brink of legibility. By showing Mr. Lowenstein with three emissaries of Cool Brittania, Ms. Ivorian Gray has emphasized both the funkiness and earnestness of this underrated New Yorker.

If Urban Baroque puts you in the mood for perfidious Albion, be sure to catch Jeremy Blake’s retro riot of a DVD, “Reading Ossie Clark,” on show at Feigen Contemporary through this weekend. Clark was the great celebrity fashion designer of 1960s Swinging London.

Choice quotes from Clark’s recently published diaries (“Marianne bought a suede suit trimmed in python with a fluted peplum and never asked the price”) are narrated in a suitably plush, Julie Christie-like accent by New York artworld impresario Clarissa Dalrymple. Phrases like “She comes in color” and “One snort of cocaine makes me into a new man, and that man wants two snorts” rub up against a montage of period film clips and fashion plates over which abstract psychedelic animation is louchely layered in correspondingly gaudy hues.

The result would have been nine delectable minutes of an acid trip down memory lane were it not for the fact that you have to pass a display of puny paintings to exit the gallery. Mr. Blake’s whimsical and ephemeral vision is perfectly suited to the editing room, but his painting, in the now ubiquitous knowingly inept “it’s okay that it’s crappy because it’s only from photographs” style is a real let down. You need to watch your back if you’re painting Celia Clark, Ossie’s Missus and the muse of David Hockney.

For more fun and games with clothing, check out Aristides Logothetis at Cue, the admirable new non-profit space in West 25th Street’s Whitehall Building. Cue awards debut (or “too long since”) shows to emerging or neglected artists who are picked for the honor by guest curators. Athens-born Mr. Logothetis was the choice of William Fagaly, former assistant director of the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Mr. Logothetis orchestrates a rapturous interplay of forms in paintings and sculptures that reference DNA models, microscope slides, fashion, and Fifties decor. One piece, “Protein,” (2003), a five foot high open-form sculpture made from Bermuda shorts joined at the leg openings and filled with foam and cement, puts you in mind of a giant cell structure, perhaps the protein of the title. The pulsating blobs and lozenges of “Tabla Bubbly,” (2001), a riff on early Ad Reinhardt or Bradley Walker Tomlin, assume a new significance in company with the assemblages.

There is a cheeky subversiveness to the back and forth banter throughout this show between garish plaids and minimalist grids. The deft interaction of tennis balls and fabric in “Blorb,” (2000), in which bright colored stripes are suggestively pulled and stretched, looks like an unlikely collaboration between Louise Bourgeois and Ellsworth Kelly. There is all sorts of nifty play with biomorphized handbags and writhing neck-ties. Never has the modern sculptural convention of the “disagreeable object” looked so agreeable.

A more sedate set of connections, sanctioned by art history, nonetheless produces sumptuous and suggestive results in the work of the Phillipenes-born painter, Augusto Arbizo. His show, entitled “Rise and Fall”, marries the romantic landscape idiom and abstract expressionism.

Readers of Robert Rosenblum’s classic text “Modern Painting and The Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko” would be forgiven, however, for pointing out that this couple have already been living in sin for quite a while.

Mr. Arbizo starts his large, weird, glossy canvases with chance gestures which he proceeds to interpret, discovering in the congealing paint a glowing moon within forlorn trees or a dense forest of algae.

Of course, this strategy extends much further back than Professor Rosenblum and his romantics (original and latter day) to Leonardo, who extolled the suggestiveness of stains and accidental patterns to the landscapist. While Mr. Arbizo more closely recalls Rorschach tests, Max Ernst’s forests, and Jay DeFeo’s legendary Rose (currently on view at the Whitney incidentally) than Leonardo, he adds a welcome contemporary twist to the occult strain in landscape painting.

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