In this exhibition of recent work D’Arcangelo has simplified, fragmented and flattened his silhouetted imagery of highway markings and the highway landscape and moved more directly into a formalist focus. Where, in certain earlier paintings, the highway would recede illusionistically toward the vanishing point, in these pictures it holds and affects the picture plane. The broken white center dividers become, now, parallelograms and the grassy embankments flat walls of green canvas separating the black road-base from the blue sky-top.

The play, here, is between flatness and illusory depth with tensions deriving from the inability of either side to win. But these tensions are not extreme, nor is the stark authority of the consistent black, white, green and blue color scheme enough to charge the paintings with a sustainable interest. Even the evocation of the mechanized landscape seems part of a rather conventional scheme to resolve an earlier image in up-to-date terms.

—Don Factor