Three Brooklyn-based critics join David Cohen at the podium April 12 for The Review Panel at Brooklyn Public Library in what should be another stormy, contentious evening of critical debate: Lance Esplund, Kara Rooney and Robert Storr. And as added spurs to liveliness, a radical feminist twist or two. Judith Braun, subject of a two-part (and two-borough) show at McKenzie Fine Art on the Lower East Side and Simuvac Projects in Greenpoint, was one of the original “Bad Girls” in Marcia Tucker’s thus titled 1994 show at the New Museum, while the title of Betty Tompkins’ show at the FLAG Art Foundation, “WOMEN Words, Phrases and Stories,” gives a fair flavor of the feistiness to expect there. Also prone to the prodding and probing of the panel, shows of Omer Fast at James Cohan and Molly Lowe at Pioneer Works.

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Don Voisine’s masterful geometric puzzles have always packed a wallop, implying supergraphic mural scale despite their modest, easel painting dimensions. In the new work, taxicab yellows and blood reds, previously held in tight compression at the borders, invade the center where dark matter normally reigns. There Voisine’s stroked gloss and matte effects bounce in the eye as through a polarized lens, creating internal angles that hinge as you walk. In strong color, compared to the usual black, these subtle, monochromatic contrasts amplify weirdly, and time seems to stitch back to 1965, when Ad Reinhardt, Bridget Riley and other perfectly highbrow painters were included in The Responsive Eye, MoMA’s definitive Op exhibition. A half century on, that show’s controversial conflation of the eternal truths of hard-edge abstraction with faddish optical kicks seems perfectly viable, at least in Voisine’s smartly synthetic practice.

on view through June 14 at 55 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side, 212 989 5467

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January 24, 2014 at the National Academy Museum,  moderator David Cohen’s guests were Hrag Vartanian, co-founder and editor of the blogzine, Hyperallergic; Christina Kee, a regular contributor at artcritical; and Village Voice critic Christian Viveros-Faune.

The shows discussed were Allison Schulnik Eager at Zieher Smith, Thomas Bangsted at Marc Straus,  Wade Guyton at Petzel and Lori Ellison at McKenzie Fine Art.

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January 5 to February 11, 2012
511 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 989 5467

In previous shows, you had to ask to see Lori Ellison’s drawings.  Her elaborate doodles on lined paper were kept behind the desk, in plastic sleeves or retained in their floppy, spiral-bound notebooks.  At McKenzie, a number of these densely florid ballpoints have finally been liberated.  Delicately mounted on the wall, they assume their true dimensions.

Drawing is fundamental to Ellison’s practice.  Worthy of contemplation on their own terms, these works are the quaking earth beneath the relatively quiescent structurings of her better-known paintings.  Deprived of the context of the drawings, Ellison’s careful geometric abstraction can look almost too polished, too knowing.  In proximity to the drawings’ thorny touch and seismic agitation, however, these Insider paintings look a lot more Outsider.

The biomorphic logic of Ellison’s goth drawing sensibility bursts at the margins, pushing against the limits of dime store materials and human perseverance –– as urgent and resourceful as a prison tattoo.  By default, it induces mesmerizing claustrophobia.  One drawing piles up tiny wagon-wheel rosettes in airless suffusion; another seems to depict undulating skin caught in a shallow relief of ropey netting; a third could be a dissection study of spongy tissue squashed into a box.

Not all the ballpoints are super-dense.  One pleasingly restrained drawing floats what looks like a continuously bending, mile-long bicycle chain above a luminous, wooly ground.  Another airy drawing suggests an unraveling Celtic knot, with fine indications at crossings as to which strand passes above and which below.

If these images are abstractions, they are carefully illusionistic ones, with light-struck volume and precise contrasts of texture, weight, and surface.  On the other hand, Ellison can elicit dizziness by graphic means alone, as with one lapping curve motif that generates something like inside-out, space-filling yams.  Even more purely graphic are her numerous grids and webs: impossibly dense, emphatically wobbly, but geometric to the core.  And it is these ballpoint abstractions of triangles and squares, informed by the occasional lighter touch just described, that locate points of departure for Ellison’s current painting practice.

McKenzie is showing a few earlier paintings, more sculptural and imagistic, but Ellison’s recent two-color gouaches on wood panel, methodically constructed by applying a dark pigment over a light ground of near hue, are the main event.  They are calm where the drawings are frantic; polished and professional where the drawings are abject.  Even when taking direct handoffs of restless motifs from the drawings, the paintings tame these pressurized nets, cages, and cells, toeing a line of polite, measured exactitude.

Three untitled gouaches from 2011, for instance, one purple, one green, and one blue, make use of a freely tiling triangle motif.  The blue version exploits variations in paint density to release the eye into the pattern’s winding, ambiguous depths, which are only implicit in ballpoint.  When this improvisational mesh of geometry is activated, it can dance like the phosphorescent scales of a dragon.  Here, the upgrade in materials provides elegant compensation for the loss of the drawings’ scratch and fury.

But that is the exception to the rule.  The purple and green versions of the motif, though lovely, remain comparatively inert; as with most of these gouaches, the paint is applied with as little inflection as possible, flattening the image into a dispassionate, serially tinted monochrome.  The two paintings that carry off this cool approach best are lively figure-ground interplays of overlapping rectangles, which look as if Ellison had scattered decks of tiny cards over the light-colored ground, applied a coat of darker color, and then removed the cards.  Jagged conjunctions, reading as perforations, suggest fragments of Islamic ornament.

Typically, however, her patterns are both more rigid and more handmade, and any associations with sacred architecture or textiles, rather than buoying the paintings up with transcendental energy, tend instead to anchor them in the busy-work of their construction.  Two gouaches, for example, interweave negative and positive triangles into concentric oval bands, like a hooked rug, around an oval void.  Again, Ellison rests her case on the pattern alone, and this one has its nuance and starry fascination –– even, perhaps, a narrative of memento mori in the vacated portrait niche at its center.  But these modest devotional panels remain actual-size.  Their repudiation of psychic sweat, rather than releasing the pattern to do its cosmic work, seems to take for granted that the decorative should lead to the visionary.  As I suggested earlier, Ellison’s paintings can seem all too quotational: not only of tribal, folk, and religious arts, but of Mondrian, Reinhardt, and Frank Stella; of Agnes Martin, Myron Stout, and Bridget Riley; and most of all, of a generational embrace of “hypnotic geometry” –– Raphael Rubinstein’s description of the post-psychedelic Brooklyn-centric scene in which Ellison is well known.  (Rubenstein’s phrase comes from a brochure text written for Ellison, to which  I also contributed.)

At McKenzie, however, Ellison’s paintings can be seen in context as healing balms of meditative objectivity, counterbalances to the blazing obsession of her drawings. The careful craft of her small, luminous gouaches redirects the drawings’ arrested teenage alienation onto higher planes–planes to which Ellison aspires with all the dogmatic fervor of the self-taught convert.  Ellison’s knowingness, in other words, is the exact opposite of Insider sophistication.  If the paintings presume too much, it is from a rare, authentic mixture of erudition, innocence, and deep hunger.

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Robert Berlind, Eleanor Heartney, and Mark Stevens joined David Cohen to discuss Hans Haacke at Paula Cooper, Nancy Spero at Galerie Lelong, Duncan Hannah at James Graham & Sons, and Barbara Takenaga at McKenzie Fine Art.

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JAMES SIENA
PaceWildenstein until January 28, 2006 (534 W 25 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 929 7000)

BARBARA TAKENAGA
McKenzie Fine Art through December 17 (511 West 25 Street, between 10 and 11 Avenues, 212 989 5467)

SUZAN FRECON
Peter Blum through January 14, 2006 (99 Wooster Street, between Prince and Spring, 212 343 0441)

James Siena is like a one-man lost civilization. An odd mix of diversity and unity, his work is uniquely his own, yet charged with a suprapersonal force more familiar from enthnographic artefacts.  His first exhibition at his new gallery, PaceWildenstein, offers a dozen new paintings and two dozen drawings that extend a pictorial language he has made familiar in the last fifteen years of complex lattices, at once tight and wayward, and repeating patterns of mesh, of herring bone, or of bento box-like structures of rectangles within rectangles, Russian-doll like in their endless succession. His use of sign-painter’s enamel on metal lends his compelling, enigmatic works surfaces of cool succulence, glowing but distant.

There are numerous shades of other artists and cultures—this viewer is reminded, on the collective side, of African textiles, Maori tatoos and Tantric art and such individuals as Gustav Klimt (his decorative backgrounds), Joaquin Torres Garcia, and the obsessive outsider artist Friedensreich Huntertwasser.  Rather than coming across as referential, Mr. Siena seems something of an outsider himself, plumbing his own depths to arrive at an authentic, primordial intensity.

He couldn’t be less of an outsider, as it happens: a Cornell graduate, a star of the last Whitney Biennnial, and an acknowledged leader of his generation, he’s as clued in as any artworld insider.  But his abstract language has a remarkable freedom from either the old fashioned modernist fusion of disparate primitive and prehistoric influences into a generalized soup of Ur-forms, or a postmodernist deliberate cacophany of styles.  Instead his weirdly exquisite, compulsively detailed, fanatically methodical designs seem disarmingly practical, charged with the kind of energy you might get in a precolumbian proto-computer, or cosmologies from a vanished religion.

This purposiveness is hard won, for Mr. Siena works within stringent rules. Homo ludens—the man who plays—his drawings are elaborations of what he himself describes as visual algorithms.  Each work has its own predetermined set of procedures in relation to which the results both adhere and deviate, as a title like “Coffered Divided Sagging Grid (with glitch)” reveals.  Despite his art having great warmth, charm and empathy, Mr. Siena is, par excellence, a conceptual artist, as he is interested in seeing what happens if you submit your art to the realization of a preconceived idea.

Some pictures, like put me in mind of Mr. Close’s almost occult portrayal of a Svengali-like Lucas Samaras.

The nutty, trippy, transcendentally labor intensive aspect of Mr. Siena’s work places him in the company of a broad spectrum of contemporary artists whose art taps a finely wrought psychedia. Peers in this realm would certainly include Bruce Pearson and Fred Tomaselli. The Whitney Museum’s recent “Remote Viewing” exhibition of painters of invented worlds, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s survey of art that explores the narcotic, “Ecstasy: In and About Altered States” point to a spaced-out strand in the zeitgeist.

Barbara Takenaga is a priestess in this cult.  She creates sumptuous decorations of mind boggling complexity that fill you with a sense of awe not just because of the exhilerating cosmos they depict but because of a sense of the heightened consciousness required for such creation. Once the eye adjusts to a sense of gaudy overload, and overcomes the prejudice of feeling you might have seen such imagery on the cover of a molecular chemistry textbook, it becomes clear that she is an image crafter of formidable power.

Each of the fourteen paintings on display, which range from 12 by 10 inches to 70 x 60, a significant jump in size for this artist, must have required staggering feats of patience and mental organization.  “Rubazu” and “Corona #2 (Golden), both of 2005, are spirals packed with vibrant balls of radically disjunctive scale.  At the heart of each vortex are tiny little dots that such the eye into infinite space.

She favors a much tighter, neater delivery than we get in Mr. Siena, with a bright, dense all-overness and dazzling synthetic color.  As a result, we don’t get the sense, as we do in Mr. Siena, of a hand leading directly to mental presence.  But for an art that seems at first to be all about special effects there is a surprising amount of surface pleasure to be had in Ms. Takenaga.  This comes out especially in a play of solid against acqueous paint, which corresponds with a theme of flatness versus depth, as in “Gold + Red” 2005, where the orbs, distributed in an almost Paisley-like spiral, each have a sense of being a contained world, filled with wobbly light.

While Ms. Takenaga complements Mr. Siena’s near-psychotic obsessiveness, his timeless, archaic quality resonates with another remarkable exhibition opening today, also a debut with a new gallery, Suzan Frecon at Peter Blum. She has half a dozen large paintings, three of them in fact diptychs of horizonal canvases stacked to nine foot high by 87-3/8 inches.

Her art can be described, in a contradiction that also recalls Mr. Siena, as hand-made hard edge: Patiently crafted, unegotistical, lovingly carved-out forms whose sense of the definitive feels personally won rather than merely given.

A consumate colorist, Ms. Frecon concocts her own mixtures of oil and pigment, favoring subtly discrepant tones rather than contrastive hues.  “composition with red earth and red earth,” 2005, uses the stacked canvses to posit one tone of terracotta against another, the top slightly more paprika, the bottom chocolate.

While some of the forms are strictly rectangular, a favorite motif is a curved shape of vaguely Islamic reference, somewhere between a turban and a dome, depending whether you read them in positive or negative against their ground.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, November 17, 2005

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AUGUSTIN FERNANDEZ
Mitchell Algus until July 16
511 W. 25th Street, 212-242-6242

GOOD VIBRATIONS
McKenzie until July 30
511 W. 25th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-989-5467

The Pre-Raphaelites still have a lot to answer for. The cult of wan Ophelias, Madonna-vampires, and socialite sirens that began with Rossetti and Millais reached its apogee in Munch and Klimt, only surviving at this stage in history as a kitsch parody of itself. But a new show at Bellwether suggests the reign of sultry and sinister lovelies continues unabated. “Idols of Perversity” is a portrait gallery packed cheek-by-jowl with killer damsels.

If dead critics could be resurrected for the purpose of reviewing contemporary art, this show might be the occasion to disturb the slumber of Max Nordau, as it is an almost willful vindication of the vituperative anathemas expressed in his notorious 1892 polemic, “Degeneration.” The title of the show comes from Bram Dijkstra’s illuminating, level-headed analysis of fin-de-siècle artistic misogyny; ironically, Amazon’s “customers also bought” list for Dijkstra’s book is topped by Nordau.

John Currin, the best-known artist in the show, is by no means the sickest or silliest — a sure indication of the general level here. His fusion of schlock taste and appeal to tested academic technique does set a standard tactic, however, which others in this show follow or aspire to. His “Chewy,” a bald-headed rococo dame at her morning toilette, about to choose her wig for the day, has a tame finesse out of keeping with the company it keeps (or the artist’s own norm).

More in line with the standards of curators Thomas Woodruff and Becky Smith is Christoph Steinmeyer’s high-artifice, greased-up “Dryade” (2003), which derives its mild, nerdish intensity from a relentless symmetry. The contribution of Graham Little (an artist paired with Mr. Currin in a shared room at MoMA’s 2003 drawing exhibition, “Eight Propositions”), a portrait on gesso of a supermodel in suede boots and brown jacket, seated against a vaguely Old Masterish neutral brown ground, is brought to life by an exquisitely rendered face and gaudily Klimtian Lycra leggings.

This show brings together artists of different intentions and skill levels. Many make obvious and familiar jests about art and kitsch. A vulgar pastoral of a nymph and a spaniel by Catherine Howe, a Currin wannabe, falls between the stools of Rococo and Dada. A double portrait in contrastingly smooth and impastoed finish by Pieter Schoolwerth is essentially an academic warm-up exercise. Others look like genuine strays from tattoo parlors (June Kim, Mel Odom), prison art programs (Sas Christian), or the art departments of publishers of sci-fi books and heavy-metal albums (Ted Mineo, Lori Earley).

Yet there are also displays of genuine artistry. Ben Blatt, Ray Caesar, and Mr. Woodruff himself have the formidably obsessive and inventive skills of 16th-century Mannerists. Julie Heffernen could have been drafted to keep them company.

The emphasis in this show is on the idols, not the perversity. With the exception of a tattooed, moderately hirsute gent in a leather jacket, one or two extremely convincing transvestites, and a smattering of prepubescent schoolgirls, every other model on display, even the ones with horns and tails, could get a job at a Playboy Club. Most of the artists, in other words, may be ironic about style but are earnest about their — and our — libidos. The mild porn-quotient ensures a work’s status as kitsch, thus making it respectable as an iconoclastic gesture. The problem–as Dada fast approaches its centennial–is that such a gesture is no longer in the least perverse. Idolatry is an orthodox article of avant-garde faith.

The fault line in this show isn’t between irony and earnestness: The best kind of mannerism of necessity has both. The redoubtable Duncan Hannah, represented by four works scattered around the show, makes works steeped in enigmatic, fey awkwardness. His trademark Balthusian languor, knowing amateurishness, and wistful, obsessive heroine worship remind us that, long before Degeneration came along, there was good, wholesome Melancholia.

Viewers with a real taste for the painterly perverse should check out Agustín Fernández at Mitchell Algus. Mr. Algus is renowned as the champion of older artists battling artworld indifference or memory loss, a brief amply met by the valiant Mr. Fernández.  Born in Havana in 1928, trained at New York’s Art Students League and the subject of some success in Paris Surrealist circles in the 1960s, the artist has lived in New York since 1972 without staging a single solo exhibition prior to this one.

He did enjoyed some exposure, though, when a canvas from 1961 was used as a prop in Brian de Palma’s 1980 movie, “Dressed to Kill” (the still graced his announcement card).  The painting in question, “Développement d’Un Délire,” (above left) is actually a tour de force of fantasty and invention.  Rendered with a luscious painterly containment that looks like a cross between Yves Tanguy and Carravagio, its ambiguous personages are at once erotic and menacing, compelling and otherworldly.

This tastefully installed  historic overview demonstrates stylistic and iconographical diversity but consistent aesthetic concerns: like Matta, Bacon and Balthus, Mr. Fernández’s imagery does service to the kinky without giving way to the kitsch.  He has ways to convey an idealised sensation of bound flesh and penetrated orifice without being anatomically explicit.  At the same time, he has a private vocabulary of armor and heraldry that achieves high artifice without being camp.  A memorable set of square canvases of abstracted but teasing finesse (the three canvases stacked at the center of the right image) consist of fleshlike forms which pucker to expose a hole at their center, over which hover suggestively an object Mr. Fernández’s background encourages one to read as Havana cigar.

“Good Vibrations” at McKenzie Fine Art surveys the recent, widespread revival of Op Art, the abstract style from the 1960s that played psychological games with image cognition— close-knit lines, repeating sequences, and jarring chromas that serate your vision. Like Seurat’s pointillism, Op Art leaves the final mixing of forms and colors to the viewer’s brain.

This show focuses insistently on contemporary work in the Op Art field. The only veteran of the original “perceptual abstraction,” as Peter Selz named the tendency in a famous Museum of Modern Art exhibition, is Julian Stanczak. The younger artists tap the “retro” appeal of the scientific optimism of the original movement but bring fresh and disparate influences: mysticism, primitivism, acid trips, screensavers.

Susie Rosemarin’s technique is redolent of Mr. Stanczak’s: slight variations on a strict lattice to induce a blurry sensation of movement. Only she uses the technique to induce the illusion of a Cross of St. Andrew pulsating against a white Iron Cross, a sort of visual pun on “visionary.” Sara Sosnowy’s intense, obsessive drawings, combining Op Art and Australian Aboriginal painting, recall James Siena. Tom Martinelli induces a familiar buzz from the simple misregistration of one colored ball superimposed upon another. And Barbara Takenaga plumbs exquisite depths in her mind-numbingly fastidious concentric arrangement of little blobs of diminishing scale, inducing the mystical sensation of being sucked into a vortex.

The cheery palette and compositional fizz of “Good Vibrations” might seem a perfect palate-cleanser after the fetid decadence of “Idols,” but in a funny way it is a chip off the same block. Bellwether’s idols and McKenzie’s vibrations both trade in the frisson of revival, after all, require fastidious skill, and make appeal to basic bodily experiences, whether libidinal or retinal.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 7, 2005

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February 17 to March 19, 2005

Jim Dingilian’s marker drawings and altered found photographs at Mackenzie Fine Art are intriguing in their process and choice of materials, so much so that it can require a conscious decision to linger for a while before individual works and allow their subtle plays on memory and narrative to come to the fore. The effort is well worth it. The unexpected surfaces gradually in Dingilian’s work, and when it does the experience can be lovely and quietly moving.

Of the two bodies of work, the drawings are the more easily overlooked: small, seemingly ephemeral works on paper that could be mistaken for offhand studies or doodles. However, when seen up close these pieces reveal an evocative and in some instances elaborate abstraction, the forms suggestive of traditional western and Chinese landscapes, cityscapes and crystal and leaf shapes. On further study one notices figures and groups of figures emerging faintly through the compositions, in something like Victorian ghost photographs that purported to show the spirits of the dead lurking in the background of ordinary domestic settings. In a sense the figures in

Dingilian’s drawings are themselves ghosts, the ghosts of the original photographs. The lines in these pieces are what remain of the photographic surface when the snapshots are dipped in bleach. Dingilian applies a resistive coating, which preserves the lines; he contributes nothing otherwise to the finished work. Some interrelationship of erasure and selection is always at work in a drawing. The ghost-figures, however, introduce an uncanny otherness in the compositions. This otherness is all the more evocative and intriguing because it is so resilient and, to some degree, independent of artistic control.

The process also says something about a paradoxical desire for the unexpected, one that a good many visitors to the gallery no doubt share. It is as if one were to go looking for an experience of déjà vu, and find it. Dingilian’s drawings on grade school desk tops differ so in mood and approach from the found photographs that they could be taken as the work of another artist; one might wonder why the two bodies of work were shown together. Nonetheless, certain parallels are apparent. Whereas the photographs involve erasure, the drawings involve the trace and the residual mark: scratches and wood grain on the desk surface picked up by blue marker. The drawings all but eliminate photographic images, the desk top images evoke them. The photographs explore memory, the desk top drawings suggest emotional atmosphere or the setting for narrative. They depict a peripheral dreariness in urban and suburban landscape: truck stops and fields, the edges of strip malls. One sees them through the blue filter of the medium, as if one were looking underwater or, as the gallery statement suggests, through an old cyanotype print. The effect is of a chilled or distanced nostalgia, or creepiness or beauty. Since the blue marker is not fixed to the surface, measures must be taken to hold the image in place, an interesting metaphor in itself of the lengths one can go to keep the ephemeral. One looks forward to seeing what other materials and forms Dingilian will choose for this impulse.

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Hunt Slonem: Recent Work at Marlborough Chelsea through October 23 (211 West 19 Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues, 212 463 8634)

Reed Danzinger at McKenzie Fine Art through October 9 (511 W 25 Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, 989 5467)

The phrase “mystical decoration,” by no means a perjorative, can be used to link painters as diverse as Hunt Slonem, with his expansive, whimsical and diffuse paintings of birds, butterflies and saints, and Richmond Burton, whose eye-candy abstraction probes a tantric psychedelia at the heart of organic systems and repeating patterns. This month and next painting that’s sumptuous in unabashedly pretty effect but nonetheless spiritually edifying in intention and power holds sway in other galleries, too: Robert Kushner’s flower paintings on sliding Japanese doors at DC Moore, also qualify under this rubric. And Caio Fonseca, who will show next month at Paul Kasmin, taps a similar aesthetic of decentered design and whimsical arabesque, although occult origins are unlikely in his case. While all these artists are happy to tease the viewer with an element of campness, what is more compelling and intriguing about them is that they usually back away from overt irony.

Despite marked differences in temper and taste, there are suprising commonalities between Mr. Burton and Mr. Slonem, in terms of repetition, the grid, and passivity. But then, Mr. Burton has an almost Zelig-like capacity to blend with almost any roster of artists his work brings to mind. Take the five recent paintings in the main gallery at Cheim & Read that reintroduce the grid motif banished from his imagery in the mid-1990s. They relate equally to the tight, obsessively realized pattern making of James Siena and the almost ferociously expressive nested lines of Terry Winters, forming a rare bridge between these disperate artists.

At first, this latest series by Mr. Burton seems a radical departure from the body of work which in previous years had confirmed him as one of the most exuberant and epicurean of abstract painters. Three pieces, created concurrently with the new grid paintings and presented in Cheim & Read’s chapel-like front gallery, recall the boisterous, curvaceous, florally inspired motifs of his “I am” series a few years back: “Solex,” (2003), a five foot square arrangment of three panels, has what can read subjectively as brilliant yellow stamen chased by filiaments of torquoise and purple and hemmed in by radically cropped, pulsating orange leaves. By Mr. Burton’s standards, the images in this room are unusually iconic (as redolent of Georgia O’Keefe as of Lee Krasner with whom his name is often linked.) Although very much in flux, the forms are centered in a way that intimates a bigger order and stasis.

The grids, meanwhile, caught on the diagonal, work in an opposite phenomenological direction, to insist on all-overness and the possibility of endless repetition. Horizontal in format, they intimate vistas, a shift in scale from the microscopic (although that remains a possibility.) They are more muted and restrained in color. But they are a long way from reduction or ubiquity: what actually animates these compositions is a sense of the grid transgressed, that waves of pattern and nascent forms are suggested by the contractions and expansions of this lattice-work. The organic is seen to grow from geometric decay.

The diversity of this show could equally demonstrate restless formal curiosity or a hedging of stylistic bets. A third space reveals yet another line of inquiry: “Freak Out,” (2004) is a confected, densely packed composition of yin-yang and comma motifs. A washed out feeling in the color and surface lends the canvas the remoteness of printed fabric. Like Karin Davie and Bruce Pearson, he is happy to play with connotations of retro décor. You then start to notice similar traits in works that had initially seemed more earnest. “Solex” can’t have been divided into three sections for logistical reasons: the intentionality comes across as a knowing nod in the direction of fin de siecle screens. By signalling applied art and thus playing with received ideas of genre hierarchy, the work retreats from claims to higher authority.

Hunt Slonem is a patrician savant almost in the same class as Francesco Clemente: immensely prolific, beloved in the world of fashion, unfazed by scale, at once fey and egotistical, he is knowingly sparing with his magical touch, seeming to inculcate nonchalence, if not cackhandedness, as an aristocratic virtue.

Mr. Slonem’s work is often impressive even if rarely-in internal formal terms-very satisfying. In a way, his activity is more performative than productive: what we see is painting as verb as much as noun. With each work we have a further installment of a unique personality, rather than a thing in itself.

His virtuoso touch isn’t to do with the loading or inflection of his brush. Actually, and more interestingly, his brilliance has to do with the way repeated forms like the rabbits in the aptly named and subtly punning “Charm,” (2004) poise themselves between expressive naivity and rubberstamp ubiquity. In a work like “Ascension,” (2004) there is almost a child-like glee with which the multicolored, primitive faces fill out the flanking segments of canvas. Similarly, the repetitive, laborious, but ethereally imprecise incisions of line denoting the cage magically animate his surfaces.

At the reception desk of his show at Marlborough Chelsea there’s a press package inches thick of fashion and décor shoots in Mr. Slonem’s grandiose residences, which include his sprawling studio in West Chelsea’s Starret Lehigh Building. One sees immediately that canvases are at the service of ambience, not the other way around.

It may seem unfair to over-interpret the fact that a wall of several dozen Picabia-inspired imaginary portraits of saints looks way more impressive than any single canvas in the melange. And yet, this signals a truth about his more ambitious paintings, including those in the present show: bigger and more is not only better, but essential. And that, of course, is a contradiction in terms: that essence be revealed in overload. Therein lies the mysticism, that when you are dealing with décor rather than image, where lightness of being takes precendence over strength of expression, an aeshetic of accumulation makes more sense than one of clearing away. It is the Zen of more being more.

Apropos of overload, the charming, exquisite, labor intensive, allusion packed, technically exhilerating work of painter Reed Danziger at McKenzie should not be missed. It is true, alas, that she disproves the inverted Miesean aesthetic that serves Hunt Slonem. In her case, moving to a second or third panel (she works her exuberantly miniscule forms in oil, shellac, pigment and other media on paper mounted on board) is like taking another dose of overdose. Caveat emptor- she’s worth a shot.

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