Al Meier thinks of himself fundamentally as a painter, even though there has always been a clear tendency toward objectness in his pictures. That is, painting is for Meier not only the object of his actual artistic activity, but also the object of his reflections about art: painting thus becomes a kind of meta-painting, which acts as the comprehensive background of his work. With this process it is the poetic moment that is of primary importance, for despite all the thought involved, these paintings are not really conceptual works; rather, they are playfully intuitive approximations of precise