Steven Charles at Marlborough Chelsea

One of two shows inaugurating Marlborough Chelsea's new two-story space was English-born, Texas-raised, Brooklyn-based Steven Charles's debut at the gallery. Charles paints in overwhelmingly minute detail, and this was his first solo exhibition in four years; all the works shown were made since 2003. Titled "Thirteen Monsters for Lightning Bolt," the exhibition was dedicated to the Providence-based noise-rock duo Lightning Bolt, whose deafening live shows seem a fitting analogue to the paintings' blinding visual overload.

In a skeptical 2002 statement, the artist wrote, "Painting is a vehicle for me to dedicate myself to something I know won't work. Abstract painting is the most confusing dilemma I have encountered--it is this confusion that motivates me. I am not a believer." It is perhaps compensation for this conflicted attitude--along with nearsightedness that renders him legally blind--that drives his intense mark-making. The 18 paintings here ranged from a few inches high to 18 feet wide. All are marked by obsessive, allover patterning in enamel paint with liberal use of gold and silver leaf, which results in shiny, seductive surfaces. Modeling paste gives some of the surfaces three-dimensionality.

Made without sketches or plans, the paintings often begin with drips or splashes of paint, or a collaged image or other foreign object,

upon which Charles builds doodlelike concentric patterns of tiny marks in bright, usually contrasting, colors. It would be hard to do better, for visual and textural contrast, than the brownish-red fur with which Charles adorns (or mars?) the rust, pink, blue, white and green enamel surface of thwhissm. The canvases have the look of insanely detailed topographical maps or microscope slides of teeming bacteria--or, as artist Dona Nelson has pointed out, computer circuitry. They find close cousins in the similarly detailed and patterned paintings of James Siena and Bruce Pearson. Blobs within blobs often recall Ellen Gallagher's work and sometimes create the impression of dozens of tiny eyes staring out of the canvas.

The gleefully overstuffed visual character of Charles's paintings often finds an echo in playfully aggressive, nonsense-word titles, such as qubumealabthblpayotw. A wry humor emerges in others, as with get off the cross, the wood is needed. These two paintings are both circular, with tendrils of enamel extending several inches beyond the canvases' edges.

Though Charles normally restricts himself to painting, the show had one three-dimensional work, The Quiet Dignity of William Henry as a Sculpture, which is constructed with the same additive method as the paintings. A milk bottle, laid on its side, is thickly covered with objects: a sponge, a drawer knob, coins, corks, a bobble-head baseball player, gold leaf, modeling paste, etc. Many of the objects are painted with the same excess as the canvases, as if, faced with any surface, Charles just can't help himself.

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