Jerry Buchanan
Michael Walls Gallery
For his first New York exhibition, Jerry Buchanan showed paintings from the last five years. Pleasantly enough, the most recent work is more interesting. Buchanan’s earlier work is self-consciously eclectic; pictorial conventions and styles are subsumed within a technique so facile it is ultimately cloying. Buchanan plays around with various contradictions between the image and the frame. Each is, variously, pictorial space, flat surface, decorative surface, carpentry, craft, you name it. Thus Buchanan paints Basement, a small landscape in the style of Cézanne, and paints the wide frame around