David Reed at Max Protetch

Whether David Reed, now in his fourth decade as a painter, is refining his exquisite visual vocabulary or merely spinning his wheels was the hot topic raised by his recent solo show. Undeniably beguiling, the unmistakable look of his paintings hinges on a slithering, coiling stroke made not with a brush but with a broad palette knife, which kicks up a tiny ridge of body color alongside the glazey scrape: reflected light abuts refracted light. The techno appearance of the resulting optical blending of hues has been widely commented on. In seven major new paintings, the strokes look like enormous lengths of fire hose, flattened from disuse.

In three of the works, a significant amount of the canvas has been painted a husky, unmodulated color, isolating the chromatic action, as in #514 (126 by 54 inches, 2004; all paintings oil and alkyd on linen). Slightly below center, a knot of hot, slimy red and swirling, ethereal manganese blue, layered against broad vertical stripes in pastel hues, is encapsulated in a bumpy bubble on a wine-red ground. The colors grapple like wrestlers in a Bacon bedroom painting--and go nowhere. More successful is #520 (44 by 176 inches, 2004), its fat crimson brushmarks tumbling across a crammed field of choppy splashes in a dull blue-green, overwiped with thinned ultramarine. The red daubs are reiterated in enclosing membranes scraped pink, which turn the ground blue-purple and make the opaque green blobs really pop. Each color's heft is just enough to keep the picture unlocked and adrift.

But in #477-2 (32 by 144 inches, 2001-04), ground invades figure. Along a horizontal just above center, four or five lumpy cutouts in a matte magenta field are shifted out of alignment, revealing broad squiggles of turquoise and pale viridian. Slatherings of cobalt blue glow darkly, turning the magenta inky and the pink under-painting an electric prune. The painting has been reworked after being exhibited a few years ago, and its matrix of marks resists swift decoding.

Reed's interest in film is well known and is evident in his use of attenuated formats mimicking Cinemascope. For the viewer, attempting to determine how the motifs were assembled introduces a narrative element. Storied, too, is the artist's effort to find relevance to abstract painting in the Italian Baroque. Other texts have placed Reed's work in the context of ornament, or the erotic.

Five talky, diagrammatic drawings relating directly to the larger works accompanied the show; indicating "splatter coat" and "knife marks," they confirmed that the paintings are essentially a series of surface treatments. Shaped by procedure, they resemble clinical studies, with hardly a milliliter of pigment out of place. Highly ritualized pictorial constructions, these elegant, stylish surfaces are to gut emotion as a boxing match is to a street fight.

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