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The orderly grids that serve as the basis for Nobu Fukui's dense but rhythmic paintings are animated and almost obliterated by layers of newspaper clippings, patches of carnival color, swatches of fabric, beads and other embellishments. Their lively surfaces sometimes suggest game boards and at other times the heavily stylized nature symbolism of Japanese screens....Read Full Story

Painters who share a life as well as a studio, Brice Brown and Don Joint nevertheless have distinctly disparate abstract styles. Mr. Joint's is one of exuberant, high-key color laid down in hard-edge, geometric shapes, suggesting maybe the work of Patrick Henry Bruce. Mr. Brown's relates more to Abstract Expressionism and, say, de Kooning, with looser brushwork and a softer palette.

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In his essay for the catalouge which accompanies David Mann's show of new paintings at McKenzie Fine Art, Carter Ratcliff writes that Mann "is one of those artists whose art invites us to see ourselves seeing."

Yum, yum, yum! Luscious, glistening, wavy stripes of thick, white, acrylic paint mixed with rich blues, reds, yellows, greens, or browns. Every surface shimmers: the colors seem to change with the light. Some color fields have unlimited depth like the sky. Vague forms float through others. This work is so very tactile that the artist, Vadim Katznelson, was prompted to supply a sample of the paint he uses so visitors could hold it in their hands instead of touching his paintings.

The medium of sculpture started getting fuzzy around the edges in the early 1960's and has never stopped. It has borrowed from all kinds of adjacent mediums -- including video, ceramics, architecture, design and performance art -- and has at times merged with the environment, whether geological or social.

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This New York-based German artist makes sensuous abstract paintings by a process of his own invention that involves fusing two paintings face to face and then pulling them apart. Exhibited singly or as diptychs, the paintings look like flaking wall sections. They have lush, supersaturated colors and dry, crusty surfaces that look like velvet from a distance.

Face to face with a painting, we want to know first of all how it came into being. We wonder about technique, which is always fascinating, but what we really want to know is how a painter’s purpose guides technique. 

The eye might gravitate to Carlos Estrada-vega's paintings for their vibrant color, but the mind latches on to them as curious puzzles to be figured out, decoded. Their format appears simple enough: All are compositions based on the modular unit of the square. Some squares pair up to form rectangles, some quadruple to form larger squares, set among the smaller.

(UN)RESOLVED, Rosenberg and Kaufman, 115 Wooster Street, (212) 431-4838 (through Feb. 12). The ambiguous title is appropriate for this miscellaneous group exhibition. Among the more interesting works are exquisitely made drawings on music composition paper by Andrew Topolski; a soberly sensuous rectilinear composition made of red commercial primer paints on a sheet of steel by Merrill Wagner; and an abstract canvas with a curiously raised, netlike grid of green paint by Vadim Katznelson.

Car Culture

Jonathan Stephenson of Rocket Gallery in London organized a show called "Surface Speed" at Cirrus Gallery. Issues of desire in our consumer culture are central to the work of the Portuguese artist Augusto Alves da Silva, whose poignant photographs contrast Ferraris in the showroom to the obviously poor spectators peering in through the windows. Alves da Silva's photos go well with the Minimalist paintings of the Belgian artist Jus Juchtmans, whose fluorescent monochromes evoke high-gloss automotive finish.