Much of the substance in Gael Stack’s recent paintings derives from what is spoken or written in the course of ordinary interpersonal experience. Within an entirely visual context, she operates in the manner of a writer—a transcriber of stratified messages. The messages are of the sort received from others (like folded notes passed in school ) as well as those seized from the flux of everyday events. The oral or auditory plane is not the work’s exclusive level of content, but it does offer a surprisingly useful entry into the dense scrawl of words, numbers, hatchings, and cryptic figures that