Another aspect of current modernist painting involves the relational format, advocated as long as the work avoids “Cubist space”—the shallow, boxlike space of easel pictures—through the use of color. An accepted model for such work is Jack Bush, whose eccentric personal calligraphic forms may have inspired Friedl Dzubas, whose current exhibition demonstrates a similar manner of execution—deliberately awkward, the shapes operating between flatness and atmospheric illusion. Another painter using relational elements is Ronnie Landfield, whose recent paintings combine rectangles with quasi-Morris Louis stripes.

—Lizzie Borden