Viewderek Eller News Today

The edges of EJ Hauser paintings are mysterious places. Things occur on the periphery that one doesn’t expect. Disjunctions in the system—the perceived order of the system—unsettle the composition. Those edges push in on the networks of marks that connect across the canvas, and this compression increases the force of visual impact.

Clare Grill’s nine new paintings on linen at Derek Eller are breathtaking in their expansiveness. Usually I don’t foreground my own embodied responses to art in my writing, preferring instead to extrapolate an observation that surfaces as interpretation. But my actual gasp before these paintings was so visceral that it warrants mention.

Encountering the eight recent abstract, painted folded-metal wall reliefs in Alyson Shotz’s luminous show, Alloys of Moonlight, I thought of Gilles Deleuze’s book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. “The infinite fold separates or moves between matter and soul, the façade and the closed room, the outside and the inside,” Deleuze remarks in his study of folds as an infinite weaving of time and space in Baroque art. “Because it is a virtuality that never stops divid...