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Lance Esplund, Deborah Garwood, and Raphael Rubinstein joined David Cohen to review Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner, Elizabeth Murray at the Museum of Modern Art, Jeremy Blake at Feigen Contemporary and Luis Gispert and Jeffrey Reed at Zach Feuer.

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Hilary Harkness through June 25 at Mary Boone, 745 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, 212-752-2929.

Thomas Trosch through June 10 at Fredericks Freiser, 504 W 22nd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212-633-6555.

Can a socially progressive male critic use the term “girlie” without getting lynched? Conscience and propriety would suggest not, yet an ascendant artworld aesthetic cries out for just this word.

Show after show, it seems, of emerging arists feature Barbie-like stick-figures, delicate, often saccherine colors, wilfully adolescent touch and a hyperbolic feyness that collides an inner child with a post-feminist sensibility. Whether the imagery is diaristic, narrative, or a postmodern jumble, the exemplar for the girlie generation, perversely enough, seems to be the wacky, tortured visionary Henry Darger: young women artists are as devoted to the Chicago janitor as he was to the Vivian Girls of his magnum opus.

Amy Wilson is an extreme example of this: “The Global Appeal of Liberty,” as her show is titled, closing this weekend at Bellwether, reveals an artistic personality split between psychological intensity and total drippiness, with a fusion of anal graphic handling and delicate watercolor, on the one hand, and long, bewildering bubble captions in a neat, fastidious script, on the other. The aesthetic is somewhere between medievalism and 5th grade.

What Ms. Wilson has in common with three other current exhibitions that warrant closer attention is a charged collision of the obsessive and the ditsy: one of these shows is even by a man, just to prove there is nothing “essentialist” in the girlie aesthetic.

At the front project room at Feigen Contemporary, Elizabeth Huey’s instense, involved symbolist narratives, often starring angels, little girls, and deer (a favored motif of the girlie generation, pace Maureen Cavanaugh and Jenny Scobel) are set in primal forests with intricately rendered Tudor mansions or oppressively bland institutional or utilitarian buildings as lurking presences.

A recent Yale MFA graduate, Ms. Huey’s made a strong debut at Michael Steinberg last year. Combining folkoristic, religious, scientific and historical imagery, she pits naivité and sophistication against one another in terms, equally, of subject matter, artistic language, and attitude; the same dichotomy relate to her own interestingly split intentions.

Her show is dominated by a monumental diptych: “ The Cyclothymic Forest,” (2005). The figure of a young woman in a stylish, slightly retro dress repeats in mirror form at the joining edges, suggesting she is the “Girl, Interrupted” of the psychological disorder referenced in the title. But the two canvases fail to divide along bipolar lines, as degrees of elation and enervation permeate both halves. She is lost in her forest of signs: washed out gray sheep meander along pathways; men in green jackets empty likely toxic contents of a bucket down a manhole; a dominatrix with a blanked-out face struts around; illustration book twin girls with spindly legs, one dressed in Indian feathers and a bandit mask, look on. The figures seem pasted in, oblivious of one another, their costumes appropriated from different epochs and unrelated dramas, and yet this is far from being a flattened-out, arbitrary decorative schemes: the elements are held together by a strong narrative urge.

In Ms. Huey’s handling, incongruity has neither the menace or humor of surrealism nor the cyncism of such image anarchists as David Salle or Sigmar Polke. What she offers instead, bravely, is an internalized bipolarity, with a handling and rendering that veers from masterful confidence to mousey feebleness, lyricism to quiet angst.

***

The narrative energy in Hilary Harkness is in a higher gear than in Ms. Huey: the focus of her sapphic, sado-masochistic orgy scenes, pillages and riots is unrelenting. Her skills are in harmony with her vision: where Ms. Huey paints with an awkward approximation of old master painterliness, Ms. Harkness has the hard, clean, nerdish exactitude of a cartoonist. She can be oldmasterly, too, but in her case it is the finesse of mannerist paintings on copper that come to mind: paint is transparent, surfaces sealed.

But while a typical Harkness is crowded to bursting point with legions of near-identical figures—willowy, leggy stick figures running around torturing each other and exuding as much individuality and personality in the process as laboratory mice—they actually share with Ms. Huey’s angels and children a vacant sense of alienation. Her cloned cast is a herd of loners.

Less than a year ago Mary Boone presented her first show of this fascinatingly perverse artist: three relatively small panels were given a wall each of her Chelsea barn. Now, in a less precious display, an exhibition ostensibly devoted to drawings, which actually includes new panels and works in oil and watercolor on paper alongside line drawings, is offered at their uptown gallery. Morally speaking, it is business as usual: a massacre on a beach, a shoot out amidst back to the future modernist skyscrapers, a mass ablution in a luxurious ladies room.

As ever, formally speaking, there is an amazing balance of detail and all-overness. “Heavy Cruisers” presents in cut-away cross section the bowels of a ship heavily populated by sailorettes equally busy with the naughty and the nautical. If the title is a suitably unsubtle pun, the handling of different mediums nonetheless reveal the extraordinary touch and control of this weird young woman. The firm delicacy of her line drawing, for instance, which have the legato exactitude of engravings, recall the neoclassical draughtsman John Flaxman. It makes one think: if Flaxman had honed his skills to Sade rather than Dante art history would have had its Harkness two centuries earlier.

***

“Pardon me if I seem lost in a world like a girl in a dream,” exclaims the bubble above the head of one of Thomas Trosch’s protagonists, a middle-aged lady presiding over a suburban salon. Mr. Trosch’s paintings are a risqué satire of modern art and bourgeois femininity. His absurdly camp style has often been compared with Florine Stettheimer in terms of whimsicality, naivité, and jolly palette, but where Stettheimer’s subject was her own high powered interaction with the pioneers of American modernism (Duchamp was a fixture in her salon) fused with a language, however fey, of personal intensity, Mr. Trosch offers a different edge in his collision of subject and style. He has almost recognizable Abstract Expressionist masters, or at least their spin-offs, blend with his rococo touch and girlie palette, sending up the supposed machismo of these heroic masters. But Mr. Trosch is demostrably more than a mere satirist: within the histrionics of his own tongue in cheek style he is concerned with the same formal issues as his mid-century artistic victims, for all that he tries to seem as blasé about them as his ladies-who-lunch fashion victims.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, May 2005

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“Suzanne Caporael” at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery until February 12 (730 Fifth Ave at 57th Street, 212-445-0444).

“Graham Parks” at Feigen Contemporary until February 19 (535 W 20th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, 212-929-0500).

It seems to be widely assumed that questions about the language of art reached a dead-end at some point in the 1970s, after which anything but structural issues were up for grabs. A number of contemporary artists have put paid to this notion, however, with work that reopens the file on art and language but without reverting to the arid, somewhat pompous posturing typical of the decade when semiotics dominated the way artists thought about, talked about, and made art.

Once again painters are questioning the rudiments of their art — treating brushstrokes, say, or paint itself, or the support, to a kind of linguistic analysis —without becoming reductive or theoretical. They are engaged in what you might call semiotics without tears: Self-consciously laying bare the building blocks of pictorial syntax in ways that actually encourage poetic whim and painterly delectation. This has been true in past work of three artists I admire who are each subject to solo exhibitions right now: James Hyde, Suzanne Caporael, and Graham Parks.

Mr. Hyde is up front about his conceptual intentions and approaches them with insistently good cheer. In some works in his current show at Brent Sikkema, he actually incorporates pieces of parquet and what look like toy bricks — as if to literalize the metaphor of the building block (one piece is actually called “Paragraph” to enforce the linguistic connection). This would have tied in very neatly with the work the other two artists presented in their immediate previous exhibitions at their same current galleries — Greenberg Van Doren and Feigen respectively — but as it happens, each has moved on to less overtly structuralist, relatively personal and expressive bodies of work.

In 2003 Ms. Carporael exhibited a series titled “Littoral Drift,” which represented named estuaries from around the world. She took her cue from John Stilgoe’s book, “Shallow Water Dictionary” (1990). Inspired by the way the author interconnected etymology, natural history, and personal observation, she sought an equivalent in a systematically pared-down range of colors and a set of shapes that, although subjective, had the feeling of being determined by some concrete, empirical measure.

The new body of work, in a show called “Reading Time,” is more diffuse in genre and style, with literal, immediately legible imagery: figures, buildings, trees, sunsets. Though there is more gutsy painthandling, restraint is still her hallmark. She retains her essential, most delectable characteristic: a kind of dispassionate intensity. She crafts grounds that are deliciously slippery (they read more like glassine paper than linen, lending them a slick, designer quality.) Her colors are often teasingly ambiguous in temperature.

Ms. Carporael is conscious of mark the way the best modern poets are of words. Every one she makes seems deliberate and examined, without becoming precious or ponderous in the process.

You could say, actually, that brushstroke has taken over the role played by shape in the “Littoral Drift” show. Sometimes, the artist constructs the image out of lush horizontal strokes in almost caricatural fashion, as in “434 (armless man in green sweater)” (2004) or in various striated cityscapes. Images of a sunset, a tree in bloom, a snowstorm, or a Parisian park recall, in the almost mosaic-like application of individual brushstroke-tesserae, such disparate sources as Nicolas de Stael, Klimt, Alex Katz, and Cézanne.

The strongest images in the current show are the two seascapes where the waves are at once strokes and shapes (the same is true of the snowstorm but the effect there is less taut, more decorative.) In the seascapes, which recall certain Mondrians circa 1909–10, the subject makes depictive sense of the glossy ground. The choppy waves are built up of single-stroke rectangles, hued in a tight range of coolly contrastive blues, purples, mauves, and — inflected by these colors — whites.

The beauty of Ms. Caporael’s waves is that density and direction alone establish dynamic, while the brushstrokes, individual in color, character, and shape, remain inviolate (at once signifier and signified, in structuralist parlance). Works of contained passion, these pictures are, in a profound sense, composed.

***

Graham Parks’s last show at Feigen marked an extraordinary debut, and not just as a Cinderella tale of the arthandler — at the gallery that now represents him — made good. With small, quirky, graphic designerish paintings of delicate poise and precision, he seemed to have hit upon the painterly equivalent of a haiku: poetry that derives from its opposite, the prosaic. By choosing as his motif functionalist architecture at once bland and utopian, he seemed to strike a miraculous balance between image and means.

His new show continues to tease out the unpainterliness of his finely honed craft. The pictures, once again, look more like something else, this time woodcuts or — more precisely, as he actually paints on wood and exploits relief techniques — like inked-up blocks themselves. He has turned his back on the city to explore nature, photographing woodlands and parks in his native Spokane , Washington , and in Kyoto , Japan .

The new images bid farewell to the jazzy intervals and perspectival compressions that were the joy of his first show. There are clever things going on, technically and metaphorically, with games of negative and postive, push and pull, remoteness and investment. But with their newfound intricacy, their dense alloverness of foliage, there is a loss in lightness. Mr. Parks’s haikus have become epics. Still, the show suggests an artist of extraordinary potential who is close to finding his form.

***

Lightness will always be Mr. Hyde’s form. Where both Ms. Caporael and Mr. Parks take finesse to one extreme, Mr. Hyde takes unfinish to the other. He is truly an heir of arte povera, the aesthetics of the artfully down at heel. He is so intimate with the agenda of the French abstract-minimal Support-Surface movement as to be their honorary consul in New York .

This new show puts the brakes (temporary, it is to be hoped) on his recent turn towards sumptuousness, with a renewal of the rough and ready inquisitiveness that marked his debut in the early 1980s. There is no hint of the voluptuous form he had been exploring in the last few shows, where a giant, gallery-sized pillow, filled with newspaper or pumped with air, would support an ethereal, impressionistic painting. Nor do we have his plexiglass vitrines, filled with random-seeming accretions of paint. The new work recalls Richard Tuttle in its precious slightness of means. Painterly gesture is almost absent in this relatively austere body of work.

Although his work is rarely two-dimensional, Mr. Hyde insists painting is indeed his project. And he is no prankster: Within his oddball and quirky means, he explores the most traditional of painterly concerns. In the present show, for instance, this includes light. Surfaces include buckled segments of heavy, plastic sheeting, chromed steel, and vinyl that reflect the viewer, the environment, or found objects in varying intensities. In a departure for Mr. Hyde, a few images use digital prints as supports: One shows a child carrying a torch, upon which a cropping frame of painted masking tape is imposed. It is an enigmatic, and probably not, at the end of the day, terribly profound statement, but it is part and parcel of an inquiry that’s open, liberal, intelligent and fun, and thus welcome on all counts.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, January 13, 2004

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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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“Online”
Feigen Contemporary until August 9
535 W. 20th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-929-0500

If Paul Klee could famously “take line for a walk,” then James Siena has taken it to the wild side. A stunning, extensive display of 78 of his drawings fills the spacious Chelsea premises of Gorney Bravin + Lee. While some works date back to the mid-1980s, the majority are from the last few years. During this time, Mr. Siena has regularly exhibited paintings. Although he works on a pronouncedly small, sometimes even miniature scale, his prolificacy is remarkable precisely because of the mind-boggling feats of concentration his work entails. (The works on paper, incidentally, have an untraditional relationship to the paintings in that they tend to be larger, are no more exploratory, are equally colorful, and are at least as sharply defined.)

Mr. Siena has the involved totality of vision of an outsider or a primitive. Not that this stops him from being art-world savvy, of positioning himself in relation to recent art and current issues. Like his peers Bruce Pearson and Fred Tomaselli – with whom he shares an almost retro penchant for “trippy” psychedelic effects – his idiom collapses the division between process and product. There is an intensity of craft that undermines the quaint critical notion that how the work was made is merely the artist’s business. On the contrary, recognition of the meditative detachment that went into their facture puts the viewer into a similar state. This is art that makes you want to say “Om!”

Mr. Siena’s mind is a museum without walls. Cultural references and associated sensibilities range from African textiles, the decorative lozenges in Gustav Klimt, Bridget Riley’s swirls, and Moghul miniatures, to the outsider visions of Friedensreich Huntertwasser and James Castle, Tantric art, Escher, Aztec architecture, Haring’s grafitti-inspired notation, and Maori tattoos. Any list is partial, yet the more eclectic it gets, the more, counter-intuitively, it affirms a unity of purpose in the artist. All this stuff is not so much source material as points of affinity. It is as if, in his higher aesthetic-meditative state, the artist tapped decoration’s collective consciousness. The beauty here, however, is that he doesn’t lose sight of the cultural value of diversity. He unironically reconnects abstract painting to a deeper wellspring of pattern generation. The minimalist grid mutates into a spider’s web.

The key to understanding Mr. Siena is to see that he works algorithmically. In classic pictorial aesthetics, form is discovered in relations between static components. Without necessarily overriding this criterion, Mr. Siena’s art sets a different dynamic in motion, one that has to do with the rhythms of unmechanical repetition. In his scaled-down, slowed-down pictorial world, fluctuation is a subtle equivalent of gesture, mutation a kind of narrative.

At best, narrative incident reveals itself quietly and unforced, as in the accordion-like bulging and squashing rows of “Double Recursive Combs, Red and Black” (2003), a gouache that recalls African design motifs. Other times, however, narrative seems imposed, as in the graphite drawing, “Partially Coffered Unknot” (2003), which has a dense knottedness at the top, almost depicted in perspective, that gives way to a single thread at the bottom: a heavy-handed plot by Mr. Siena’s standards, threatening his gentle equilibrium.

This is not to say that his art conveys a single mood. On the contrary, there is a welcome range of temper. But formally speaking, all-overness suits Mr. Siena best, as it frees him to introduce a subtle play of layering versus flatness. In a dense, pulsating arrangement of interlocking shapes entitled “T-Ramparts” (2003), for instance, modulations in the pressure of the pencil send a shimmering wave across the sheet, to magical effect.

***

OnLine, a sprawling 38-artist salon at Feigen Contemporary, was curated by Charlie Finch, the subtlety of whose contribution to aesthetics is indicated by the title of the book he co-authored: “Most Art Sucks.” On the evidence of this show, he has a correspondingly robust appetite for the trashy and the illustrational. Which isn’t to say his taste is necessarily uninteresting: Walter Robinson’s washy porno playing cards and Hilary Harkness’s coyly lesbian comic-strip adventures are enormous fun as ever. Luckily, Mr. Finch enlisted two highbrow friends, George Negroponte and Rob Storr, to co-select with him. Three distinct sensibilities brought diverse talents to the table; undiplomatically, published statements by each name names.

The theme of line and drawing does not seem to have held back any selector from artists pursuant of neither. But there are fine works and surprising juxtapositions that vindicate their efforts. For instance, the sharp, primly architectonic wall drawing by Storr-choice David Brody at the front of the gallery relates in its circumscribed mutations to the fey, ethereal, but in its way equally obsessive romanticism of Negroponte-nominee Eric Holzman, hanging downstairs.

Two artists who usefully test definitions of drawing here are Karin Davie, whose “Separations in Deep Yellow” extends her Op Art interest in curvy, wavy lines into sculptural relief, with pigment and zippers sunk into cascading paper, and Alexander Ross, whose giant untitled gouache with acrylic from 2002 pushes the linear and the painterly up against each other in an energizing collision of languages.

This article first appeared in The Sun, June 26, 2003.

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November 29, 2001 – January 12, 2002

Graham Parks’ debut solo exhibition, at Feigen Contemporary, announces the arrival of a singular talent. Precisionist and poised, his urban landscapes capture the inadvertent funkiness of functionalism. He has found, in a pared-down language that smacks of the graphics of architectural design magazines, a perfect means of depicting the modernist built environment. Like its subject, Parks’ form is oxymoronically elegantly bland, poetically prosaic. For sure, his exploitation of a hard-edged aesthetic reminiscent of graphics, cartoons, and commercial illustration is a mainstay of artworld strategy, but these works manage to balance knowing aloofness and emotional investment. He revels in craftsy offsetting of rough and smooth surfaces and of matt and relief, allowing color schemes to veer from exquisite proximities to acid contrasts to solarizing white-outs. His discoveries of readymade abstractions in, say, the façade of a housing project belongs, of course, to a venerable tradition, more particularly of photography than painting, and the pleasure he takes in the decorative compression of space is very Japanese-cum-Viennese, but where Parks seems onto something genuinely original is in the pleasing tension his work sets up between pristine execution and an aesthetics of chance. The disposition of stencilled elements creates jazzy intervals that keep perspective jumping around. In his hands, functional illustration deftly gives way to accidental suprematism.

In an inspired coupling, Feigen have Parks showing alongside the German Frank Breuer’s photographs of coporate logos galvanizing dull landscapes. Gas stations and factories are at once neutrally documented and nonchalently aestheticized in the style of his teachers, Hild and Bernd Becher. Breuer combines the creamy ethereal light of Elger Esser and the alertness to life imitating art of Andras Gursky, both of whom must be contemporaries, but he has a quirky individuality that is welcome.

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