The images in James Brown’s earlier work were surrounded by a sand-gray background; most of the pieces here, however, show images scratched into black surfaces. One has to search out the form within the blackness—uniform, impenetrable, yet vibrant with a tension between the shiny and the opaque. The blackness extends over the entire canvas and hides in its messy shelter a swarm of signs, neither drawn nor painted, but incised into the thick, compact paint as though into wax. Cracks and scars appear as faces and figures, an arabesque of images in the negative. And these negative forms reveal that