There is a single painting that dominates this exhibition, a painting—if one can describe it so—of such singularity that it renders the other works as experiments, exercises, considerations. All are lesser and unworthy contenders. Its only and quite distant challenger is a mere study, of similar technique but diminished comparison.

Titled “States of Matter,” this exhibition is a collection of decorative abstractions. They indulge in a melding of metalwork and painting, employing silver leaf and black clay or iron filings and jute, to produce a series of bas-relief ornaments that neither excite nor awe. 

The materiality of the compositions is indeed striking, as the numerous works luxuriate in a game of periodic table hide-and-seek; palladium over here and silver over there, yet the culmination of all this alchemy produces distinctly less than the sum of its parts. The ingredients of its craft fair conjurings are even set on a display table to prove that only pure constituents were used in the production of these grand baubles, as lacquered hardwood blocks (Pour Box and Red Pour Box, both 2021) appear to ooze gold as well as puns that become distinctly less humorous mere seconds later. 

A pair of grand vertical works slathered in gold leaf, Moon Gold Mountain (2018) and Lemon Gold Sunlight with Rain (2017) both measure 102”x72” and are less suggestive of works of art than the doors of a local house of worship. The artist no doubt employs the lavish use of gold leaf as a critique of consumerist indulgence—particularly in the art market—as gilded age impersonation is a gratification that never seems to go out of style, but such a conceit rings hollow in a commercial art gallery, where sticking it to the man is less a consideration that crushing one’s competitors. 

The lone painting of import—a grand princessing of its stunted little sister Mercury (2021) that features mother of pearl inlay—and the worthiest of these works is titled Flight (2021) and hangs at the end of the hall, nearly filling the wall at 96” X 132.” It is the work to which one’s eyes are immediately attracted and appropriately so: nothing else approaches its scale, confidence, complexity or conviction. It is also the only work that delivers the elemental exuberance at which the other paintings swing and so badly miss. Featuring ingredients that include gold leaf, lemon gold leaf, resin, iron filings, pigment, lacquer, and gilder’s clay on wood panel, it is materially complete and completely successful. The imagery is equally indulgent and complex, suggesting a cosmos richly envisioned, liquid and gaseous and full of elemental wonder. It is here that the members of the periodic table play hide-and-seek, combine and transform, and where the artist has most successfully captured the ideas that have been suggested but not fully realized in any of the other works in the exhibition. It proposes the antique and the contemporary, the here, the now, the ever after.