Pierre Soulages at Robert Miller and Haim Chanin

Two concurrent Pierre Soulages shows were the first substantial New York exposure for this towering figure in, astonishingly, nearly 30 years. For decades routinely compared, in this country, to Kline, Soulages returned with tough, textured paintings balancing black against black and strongly suggesting a goth Rothko. "Outrenoir" (roughly, "Beyond Black"), at Miller, was as somber as a chapel. Recent works on paper, at Haim Chanin, are far more approachable and even let slip a glimmer of humor.

All the works shown at Miller are titled Painting, followed by their dimensions and date. But in the absence of pictorial space or interaction of hues, the leathery black surfaces of several, like the 5-by-6-foot canvas secondarily identified as May 2, 2004, are really bas-relief. Thick, nearly parallel furrows of moderately glossy acrylic stretch sideways across the canvas, as if it were loosely wrapped in black plastic. The slightly larger, vertical September 14, 2004 recalls the pounding rhythms of the artist's earlier work; at the corners and along the edges, notches of white canvas remain as negative space, so that these tarry blacks depict, rather than constitute, a looming presence.

But Soulages is more invested in the 5-by-6-foot panel, in a format of two stacked horizontal panels of slightly different heights, as in January 28, 2005. Both are a smooth, tactile black, but the upper, slightly shorter panel is a little glossy, like a vinyl seat cushion, the lower one matte. A difference in how they entertain light is visually equivalent to a chromatic shift. The suggestion of velocity owes less to the whizzing grooves at top and bottom than to the painting's streamlined resemblance to the side of a bullet train. This format is a modular unit; variously combining textures and finishes, three glowering, stacked pairs occupied the gallery's grand rear wall, provoking the viewer to recombine them mentally.

In April 5, 2005, the lower panel has been underpainted with a hard, hot blue over which a membrane of black has been scraped smooth, turning it sooty. Similar atmospheric effects, born of the absorptive nature of paper, relieve the melodrama in 14 untitled works in walnut stain on paper, at Chanin. Not large, mounted on canvas, they are vertically oriented sheets divided along a few horizontals, many with familiar slivers of white between umber-black slats, as if the viewer were peering out of a boarded-up window. Less predictably, squeegees subtly modulate mid-tones; skins of residual stain impart a sepia glow. Illusionism rushes in. One work, a collage, intermittently reads as a sharply underlit rail against deep, brooding space; another, with its glistening, near-white bottom band, wavering shadowy midsection and inky upper half, demands to be seen as a moonlit lake stirred by a gentle breeze.

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