David Shapiro’s work, seen at Poindexter, is more abstract than Castoro’s, but it too seems to have a problem with depiction. Shapiro paints soft, misty abstractions through which float little geometric bits and pieces, often accumulating in the corners of the painting. The paintings are vertical and horizontal rectangles, usually elegant and narrow. The colors are subdued: gray white tinged with rose or blue, or golden browns fading to black. The effect is a foggy light which either recedes into or hangs in front of the surface, depending upon color, layer, and tonal transition. The canvas shapes and general appearance (a large soft center area framed by smaller, more distinct areas in the corners) suggest the painting of Jules Olitski. But the work is so distinctly spatial and littered with “things” that it looks like representational painting “after” Olitski. Like that of many painters today, Shapiro’s work suffers from facility and an overaccumulation of various painterly effects as well as from a basic confusion of abstraction and representation.

—Roberta Pancoast Smith