John McNamara is, in the time-honored phrase, a painter's painter, and, more than that, a viewer's painter. His works demonstrate a wholehearted engagement with the sensuosity of paint, the expressive potential of line, and the plays of illusionism—in short, an unabashed, old-fashioned affirmation of paint's beauty.

McNamara emerged on the Boston scene a decade ago with large, ambitious abstract landscapes featuring boulderlike forms composed of striated layers of paint. Celebratory and sensual, these won immediate, lavish local praise, putting McNamara in the forefront of a newly energized Boston