To create a firm contrast between the nostalgic and the merely passé, as any dedicated thrift shop scanner knows, style requires a decent interval of indifference to pass. During the past five years the ’50s have become the new frontier, embraced by punk stylists and the collectibles industry alike. Confronting the ’50s in furniture and decor we find ourselves face-to-face with the sometimes dimwitted marketing of the moderne. During that decade “progressive design” found a mass audience which seems, in retrospect, to have closed its eyes to the nightmarish colors and improbable forms repeated

Karen Carson’s recent paintings are extremely literary. Although they look quite different from her earlier work, they almost seem to have been painted from written descriptions of their predecessors. It is as though Carson has named the key elements of the earlier works—the solid, hard-edged ring of the tondo, the fractured planes intersecting the circles, the sparse drawing and loose painting which define the planes and fill them in—and, by naming, has split them apart. Where these forms had been layered into a stacked, vertiginous space, here they are spread out across rectangular canvases