With his well-known persona—the faux naïf from the lotusland of Marin County—and his relentlessly esoteric references, William Wiley seems like a spiritualist who doesn’t want to take himself too seriously. He frequently masks his reverence with a veneer of wackiness in order to remain one of the northern-California good-time boys—along with Robert Hudson, Richard Shaw, Robert Arneson, and Roy DeForest—who make crazy constructions. He obscures his metaphysical concerns by cramming the canvas or paper surface with his signature febrile charcoal line which describes a personal repertoire of symbols,

Stand in front of a painting by Robert Ryman and try to avoid the question, What am I looking at? You can’t. I tend toward a pragmatic interpretation of his work. His paintings are the true representation of “a square painted white,” and don’t allow the projection of symbols or metaphors. Ryman’s white is pure evidence, the most extreme perceptual experience.

In these recent works Ryman uses his customary materials: white paint, supports of varying depths, aluminum bands of varying sizes. He combines the different textures of these basic elements to create variations of format and of luminosity.