Press

In his indispensable little 2000 book, "Chromophobia," the British artist David Batchelor demonstrated the degrees to which the Western imagination since antiquity has displayed a profound fear of color, as an agent of moral contamination or a sensual sign of corruption. By contrast, Carlos Estrada-Vega is an artist who might easily regard the garishly painted statuary of Hellenistic Athens as superior to the supposed "purity" of the museum-bound Elgin marbles.

Carlos Estrada Vega's paintings make me drool. I could blame the effect on the paintings’ superficial resemblance to stacks of confections at a dulceria. But that association is itself a rationalization, an attempt to get a handle on the ineffable synaesthetic kick these works deliver.

Kevin Finklea presents reductive panels of great beauty, each highlighting an obsessive adoration of color. The attachment to color lies in color's inconclusive nature. One can never know what it is exactly. Indeed, indeterminacy is at the core of Finklea's enterprise.

You can brush, trowel, press, throw, squirt, drip or pour paint onto a canvas, or stain it with diluted medium. It has all been done.
Rainer Gross makes paint adhere to the support in yet another way in order to arriving
at compelling abstract compositions. Since the early 90s this New York-based artist from Cologne has experimented with the monotype techniques, here adapting them to create the body of paintings ("Contact Paintings"), that he displayed -together with six monotypes on paper- at Axel Raben.

What seems at first to be little more than a mosaic color study reveals itself to be much more complex. Cralos Estrada-Vega draws parallels between his meticulous process and the monastic life. His unique methodology puts a twist on the concept of painting as object.

Every time I walk out the door and go visit galleries I find something I like, but as I was explaining to my son this afternoon, meaningful experiences don't always have to be positive - just real.

Adam Fowler draws loopy lines in graphite and charcoal that look like intricate webs. Then he takes blade to paper, cutting out the space between his lines as if fashioning a doily.

New York-based conceptualist Robert Sagerman is a young artist with degrees in painting, art history and religious studies. Even without understanding his intensely contemplative painting practice, viewers can be hypnotized by his work's vivid iteration of color field painting.

William Steiger's factories, silos, cable cars, and Ferris wheels are clean, serene, and iconic...Mr. Steiger gas a show of new paintings at Margaret Thatcher...

With eyes resting on an old pipe in a small room in a monstrous gallery building on the west side of Chelsea, its painted coating ravaged with cracks and flaking, my mind wandered back into memory. How many times had it been repainted? How many and why specific colors? What had happened since that last fresh coat? Who’d been born, or died? Why did I find myself thinking about the paintings of Rainer Gross?