Christian Spruell at Bucheon

In an exhibition of 15 new abstract paintings, Christian Spruell revealed in visual form what is well-known among jazz musicians: that gestures of spontaneous improvisation best announce themselves in a contrasting dialogue with simple, regularized structures. In Spruell's large and colorful oils on canvas, those structures are most often horizontal bands of oscillating, close chroma color that occasionally allow their complementary hues to peek out from under slightly irregular edges. A few other works feature modestly misaligned grids of more pronounced graphic contrast. These are meshed together so that the vertical and horizontal bands take turns passing over and slipping under each other like the strands of woven fabric. The paint is always thick, and Spruell's painterly touch is rather blunt (to the point of being terse). The grittiness of the pigment enlivens and challenges the pictorial architecture.

Both sets of paintings feature looping, ribbonlike gestures of brightly differing paints that seem to want to soar out from the skewed regularity of Spruell's compositional structures. For example, in an untitled work from 2002, sumptuous stratifications of yellow and orange are animated by minuscule flecks of violet blue. The bands are set close together and recall the horizontal track lines of predigital video. Slicing through this color field, bright red paint pirouettes upward at a slight diagonal, perhaps a stylish cousin to Barnett Newman's zips. Here, the gestural arabesques seem like isolated fragments of cursive writing; in some other works, actual statements can be made out. In After Due Consideration (2002), crisp lettering spells "very dry every winter" upon more ambiguous gestural calligraphy, suggesting a denotative predella positioned below a tightly woven grid of red, gray and ocher.

Five smaller paintings placed less emphasis on compositional structuring devices and called more attention to the specifics of nuanced surfaces that were rich in subtle painterly incident. In keeping with their intimate scale, these works seemed relatively introverted, even as they evidenced a more playful spontaneity akin to Surrealist automatic writing. Two works even featured clusters of insect-sized photographs of faces collaged into their surfaces, offering a delightful surprise for viewers inclined to close inspection.

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