A few years ago, Jasper Johns was quoted as saying, “Art is either a complaint or appeasement.” By dint of their specific, ripe, and sometimes raucous colors, Richard Hickam’s paintings appease with an old-fashioned effusiveness which is mostly a matter of handling. The subjects—most of them human figures in boxy abstract spaces—tend to be still or in positions of flatly arrested motion or thought. Hickam’s characters exist privately. Many of them, like the imaginary moments they occupy, are made up as the painting goes along. By contrast, the nude or seminude male figures in Paul Klein’s large,