Intelligent Design

Gallery-Going

By JOHN GOODRICH
December 27, 2007

From the very beginning, painters depicted the technology of their time. Prehistoric artists at Lascaux immortalized their spears in hunting scenes, Monet painted steam locomotives, and James Rosenquist an F-111 fighter-bomber. The lightning-fast parsing of computer languages and the streaming of multi-gigabyte files would seem to present new challenges to the artist. "Machine Learning" at the Painting Center, however, explores abstract impressions of technology rather than the physical appearances of hardware. This elegant exhibition presents the busy, boldly patterned abstract paintings of four New York City-based artists. As curator Matthew Deleget explains in the exhibition catalog, none of them consciously investigated "machine learning" — a form of artificial intelligence through which computers discern patterns in vast amounts of data. Nevertheless, their paintings all reflect the hyperkinetic, technology-inspired style that has gained a solid niche in the contemporary art scene.

A spacious hanging gives breathing room to the surprisingly varied work. The paintings of Gilbert Hsiao come the closest to Op Art in terms of retinal buzz. Each of his three works consists of a simple geometric shape covered with arrays of thin, parallel shapes. Their slightly offset layers of colors impart a moiré-like shimmer when viewed from a short distance. Curving green rays emerge between the intense hues — scarlet, chartreuse, turquoise, silver, deep pink — of the triangular "Ascent" (2007). Restricted to white, black and silver, an untitled painting from 2006–07 vibrates with burnished restraint.

Terry Haggerty explores twists of illusionistic space with even more formidable control. Parallel ribbons of lines cross his silky-smooth surfaces, abruptly curling in unison at strategic points and then reversing course. "Valor" (undated) recalls the projecting louvers of a ventilation grill. In another painting (untitled and undated), lines radiate from the center before twisting at the canvas edges to resume their horizontal march. In both works, the color of the lines progresses steadily from red to a fiery orange — a measure, perhaps, of the artist's barely contained intensity.

Though among the least colorful works here, the two large paintings by Henry Brown are also the most aggressive. Their blue-green and greenish-yellow lines, carefully widening and narrowing as they progress across the canvas, join in symmetrical, angular lattices that simultaneously encourage and defeat an illusion of three-dimensionality. Close inspection reveals an underdrawing of numerous, finely ruled lines that connect a system of mysterious nodal points. Mr. Brown selectively fills the spaces in between to arrive at his pattern of color. Their peculiar facture — with private beginnings to demonstrative gestures — adds to their fanatical air.

Of the four artists, Douglas Melini is the only one to let his effort show in his surfaces. In four canvases, numerous geometric sections of striped and plaid textures overlap to create a kaleidoscopic depth. Solids and voids seem practically interchangeable: A bisecting line may consist of either a single color or a leftover strip of a plaid pattern. Ridges of underlying paint attest to much reworking of the designs, but Mr. Melini's spry palette makes for a playful rather than laborious impression. Visitors can also absorb Michael Zahn's installation, tucked away in the Painting Center's project room. By comparison, Mr. Zahn's work seems self-effacing to the point of coyness. Three beige boxes topped with single stripes sit on the floor, generic versions of taped shipping cartons. Two paintings on the wall contrast textures. One features thick black above a pale white checkerboard; the other features slightly asymmetrical lines running around the perimeter of an off-white ground, to which a photographer's test print of tones and textures has been casually taped. One senses riddles about containments, textures, and tapings, but these tend to be overwhelmed by the visual noise of one of Mr. Hsiao's paintings hanging nearby.

The paintings in the main gallery may not speak directly about the practical uses of computer technology, but visitors will find echoes of its visual symptoms everywhere: in the pixilated buzz of Mr. Hsiao's works and in Mr. Haggerty's tightly ordered forms; in Mr. Brown's vaguely menacing structures and Mr. Melini's vertiginous depths.

In one sense, the paintings seem all too well-adapted to the I.T. era. Apart from Mr. Melini's canvases, which impart a degree of personality to each color, the paintings tend to serve as efficient signs, rather than poetic re-creations, of the random regimentation of technology. In the catalog, Mr. Deleget writes that the sheer speed and quantity of visual information in the Internet Age has changed the nature of abstract art. He mentions a new model: "painting as user interface." The phrase neatly summarizes an art as efficient as our technology, but it's liable to send a shiver down the spines of the more traditionally inclined. I'll take the soulful inefficiency of Mondrian's "Broadway Boogie-Woogie" any day.