Deconstruction as a theoretical strategy has been with us for over a quarter of a century, long enough for its esthetic and philosophical critique to become a staple within the halls of academia. Thus it is hardly surprising to find a new generation of painters, reared on art school dogum, who take Jacques Derrida’s dismantling of traditional binary oppositions—once the very stuff of a utonomous painting—as a given. Jamey Bair is a good case in point, for he encourages a simultaneity of dialectical readings whereby no one binary position is privileged. Instead, order/chaos, representation/nonrepresentation,