John Greer at George Billis

This show featured 15 recent abstract works by New York painter John Greer. These meticulous, hard-edge, acrylic-on-wood or -canvas compositions, all untitled, are made of interweaving lines and interlocking geometric shapes, thickly painted in primary colors. Using reductive forms and a limited palette, Greer manages to convey in each piece a sense of flickering light and frenetic movement. The late work of Mondrian is a key inspiration here, but Greer employs more varied shapes and favors a deep ultramarine blue, a muted, almost golden yellow and a saturated orange-red.

In the entrance hall, the artist showed several small and medium-sized rectangular canvases in which thick, unbroken lines of red, yellow and blue stretch horizontally across the surfaces in repeated bands. The evenly spaced and densely packed rows bend slightly at the center in a gentle curve. The colorful bands in two smaller works form more pronounced, U-shaped curves. These pieces served as an introduction to the core of the exhibition, a series of tondos, ranging from 24 to 36 inches in diameter, which filled the room.

In Untitled #7, flamelike pointy shapes near the top of the composition seem to merge with the jagged triangles in the lower portion. As in all the works, the forms here are built up with countless layers of pigment. However, the lush sensuality of the surface textures contrasts but never clashes with the composition's cool, rigorous geometry. Untitled #6 features long, graceful bands of color that meander from the edge of the canvas toward the center. Colliding with shorter broken lines along the way, each element seems to gather energy and speed in a display of centrifugal force.

At times the labyrinthine interlacing in the tondos recalls certain works by Al Held or Valerie Jaudon. But Greer's work is in some ways more contemplative, and perhaps more closely corresponds with the sinewy rhythms of medieval manuscript illumination and the weblike motifs in Islamic art. There's no doubt that Greer would be capable of creating a sensationalist spectacle if he used a larger format--and it would be interesting to see him do so. But for the moment, he offers with these works a rather intimate and private meditation.

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COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group