The painting game: for her first New York solo in five years, Susan Rothenberg premiered a group of highly kinetic, often game-based images completed since her 1999 retrospective at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Susan Rothenberg likes to take long walks, usually hiking a couple of hours through the New Mexico desert each day. Her sensibility has always been tactile, but in the dozen years that she has spent living in the Southwest, it has become more so, and more kinetic. Avid, anxious and hyperalert, her habits of vision can be deduced from the way she wields a brush, making it dart across the canvas like the eyes of a hiker hunting for pottery shards, or like fingers probing for bones in the dirt. The field thus painted is dry and brushy as a back pasture. But there is nothing naturalistic about it. Rothenberg's paintings are almost completely devoid of natural light, and have little modeling and barely any perspective. What happens within them conforms to a closed system of rules, as in a board game--or a round of dominoes. And in fact, roughly half of the dozen new paintings shown at Sperone Westwater, in a wonderful exhibition that inaugurated the gallery's Chelsea quarters, take games of dominoes as their subjects.

These seem to be dilatory games, played out in smoky, slightly claustrophobic rooms and pictured, as has long been Rothenberg's preference, from above--by an observer, not a participant. Dominoes involves mirroring patterns--the last piece laid down is the one to match--and in using it as a subject, Rothenberg invites us to watch the way she meets her own moves, too. The first, and most spatially coherent, painting in the series is Dominoes #1 (2000-01), where we see a table and two players, including the cropped figure of a seated man visible only from foot to thigh and hand to elbow. There is an ashtray with a lit cigarette, a game in progress and what looks like a big black dog under the table, who seems to have been bonked on the rump with a stray domino.

In most of the domino paintings, however, the players' features are thoroughly disembodied and heavily abstracted. Roughly outlined eyes, ears and noses, sometimes fleshed out and sometimes not, float freely or come to a colliding stop in thickly painted fields. The hands holding game pieces, cigarettes or the occasional cocktail glass are more robust, but not much. In the casually spellbinding Dominoes-Cold (2001), two such fragmented figures face each other nose to nose. A hand hovers, poised to make a move. This player's furiously glaring eye is crammed into the bridge of his nose; his lips drift below, mute and inconsequential. His opponent's glassy eye has slid down the slope of his nose and stuck halfway, precariously atilt, like a boulder on a hill. The hand that supports his face is the only flesh-colored feature in the painting, and it is as meaty as a carcass by Soutine. All else is suspended in a ground of mottled, leafy green. This suspension--this submersion of facial features in a solution of densely applied, deeply colored paint--is a nearly palpable expression of waiting and, as such, a key metaphor in the painting, and in the series. The canvas becomes an open realm where time is protracted and senses taxed by unremitting attention, by fatigue and by the (doomed) effort to anticipate an opponent's--or one's own--next move.

If this is the phenomenology of Rothenberg's current work, its perceptual domain, there is plenty of ego psychology in it, and humor, too. A lobster-red flush colors the enormous arms and hands balancing a clutch of dominoes in With Martini (2002), while a cooler, orange-fisted player makes his move. A shadowy, beseeching hand extends its empty palm behind a spotlit, fleshy paw in Game 7 (2002). But the ritual gestures, the tight-lipped mouths, the smokily bibulous atmosphere and the game itself all suggest a man's world--and, not coincidentally but also not without irony, a certain amount of emotional constriction.

Nor is it irrelevant that these pictures of games among men are also exercises in examining male heroes of 20th-century painting. Most explicitly, Rothenberg engages Philip Guston, playing with his white-weighted palette, the texture of his surfaces and the lugubrious comedy of his late paintings. But she also quite openly takes on Cezanne's card players, Matisse's color-themed interiors, Giacometti's querulous draftsmanship, the disarrayed facial features of Picasso's women and Johns's painterly, proto-Conceptual games.

In addition to the art-historical swordsmanship, there is a fair amount of implicit wordplay in Rothenberg's recent paintings. Visual punning begins with the field that is at once perceptual, painted and pastoral, and flourishes in a group of paintings that dispense with dominoes in favor of another kind of sign language. In the warm pink flurry of brushwork that is Face-Pink (2000-01), a pair of overlong arms, unresolved where shoulders should be, cradles a single staring eye. One could say that the image shows a gesture extended for the express purpose of what is called, in the language of formalism, holding the eye--unless these arms are meant to hold the surface, or to serve vision in some humbler fashion. At the lower right corner of this painting is a big, blooming ear that is much the heartiest and most articulated of the features depicted. Does it stand for the viewer? Or is the ear an attribute of--a friendly joke about--some larger-than-life patron, stationed proprietarily at the picture's corner as in some quattrocento altarpiece?