Gary Stephan at Cynthia Broan

In this quietly impressive show (his first New York solo in five years), Gary Stephan exhibited alluringly subtle and ambiguous new abstract paintings along with sculpture and videos that extended a strain of dry wit latent in the canvases.

The paintings are acrylics, mostly untitled and in muted earth tones. On the evidence of the works here, Stephan is shifting further and further from his earlier graphic boldness and deep spaces toward understated abstractions that give the gaze nowhere to rest; in an interview last year, he professed a wish to "misdirect the eyes."

To that end, when he provides incident it is often at the edges, sometimes in the form of webs of loosely drawn circles, like clumsy filigree. The compositions also frustrate our tendency to read pictures spatially. For example, the several trapezoids in Experimental Waste (2006) get larger at the top, rather than narrowing as they would to imply spatial depth (the effect is especially striking in this comparatively large canvas, which measures 59 by 76 inches). One of the shapes is hard-edged on three sides and hazy on the fourth, as if to chide us for wanting to read it as a form in the first place.

One 24-by-24-inch canvas is dominated by a field of terra-cotta, overlaid with irregular blots of gray, a brown wedge, and a black trapezoid; dark, angular shapes at the right edge adjoin the central field, along with pale yellow-green at the left. In a 40-by-48-inch work, an off-center squarish area painted light olive nests between darker olive at the left edge and a pale gray at the right, where the filigree appears, vanishingly faint; here, too, solid black shapes creep in at the edges, weighting the canvas's perimeter. Like many paintings in the show, these two deliberately fail to offer a clear visual statement of purpose, rather forcing the eye to wander.

Resting on the gallery floor were four rocks and a chunk of wood, all from 2006 and titled Adjusted Rock or Adjusted Log, evoking Duchamp's "assisted ready-mades." Each was partly painted in acrylic; the treatment of the rocks' faceted structure suggests three-dimensional analogues of the paintings, which themselves discourage spatial readings.

Also included were four dryly funny short videos--the first Stephan has shown. They're titled as a single work for the total time they take to unfold, 2:18 (2006), and are available on disc for just 30 bucks (they also appear on the artist's YouTube page). Two are shot from above a kitchen sink: In Hi, soapy water drains to reveal four utensils arranged so as to spell out the titular greeting; in the other, a floating bowl comes under the running spigot, fills, and sinks with a plop. It's called Sink. In Tracking, a handheld camera tracks a person walking along a country road, a shot taken from a short distance behind a lamppost that almost completely obscures the subject. The gloriously dumb humor of the videos points up the very smart ways in which the canvases convey information--somehow they're both complete and leave us wanting more; they're maladroit and just right.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning