Ray Kass at Zone: Chelsea

This fine exhibition by Ray Kass, titled "Trays and Tondos," included many-hued watercolor "tondos" (actually circular images on multi-paneled, roughly square supports) on one wall and the steel trays of the now dried paints used to create the paintings on another. Many works (mostly from 2005) were on view, occupying the gallery's biggest exhibition space.

For the tondos, Kass applies watercolor with stencils and fabric scrims to toned or "smoked" paper (a method in which very wet paper smothers a fire set underneath it). According to press materials, the works are then sealed in shaved beeswax and mounted on wood panels, whose parts fit together like puzzle pieces. The fault lines of the panels are integral to the esthetics of the work, with each segment bearing a differently colored portion of the tondo.

Walking into the floor-to-ceiling display, the viewer had a sense of the artist's explorative creativity. The steel trays were hung in four rows, their dried-out watercolors ranging from light blue to yellow to red and brown. Their intuitive, varied hues and accidental forms contrasted nicely with the regimentation of their hanging. The tondos, for their part, were related to one another by their basic, repeated motif: the colorful, pieced-together circle sitting more or less in the center of the square. It is as if Kass were working out-almost empirically--all the variables in these color pairs. In this, they are somewhat reminiscent of Josef Albers's investigations of nested squares in color variations.

Kass, who lives in the Appalachian region of southwestern Virginia, also exhibited photographs of the tondo pieces that he set up both indoors, in domestic quarters, and outside, in the rural landscape. In one image, a small tondo is placed on a side table in Kass's living room, furnished with two chairs covered in blue upholstery and a blue rug. The image is a striking example of art set off by a bourgeois environment. Another photo shows a tondo placed in a stream along with Kass's dogs, the painting supported by an easel in the water. Here, the artist shows his sophisticated whimsy.

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