Even among Bay Area painters, John Meyer is a strict abstractionist. Although he sets rigorous limits on his work, he puts it through big changes from one show to the next. In 1985, he had a show of work that consisted of rectangular sheets of lacquered aluminum. They marked Meyer’s attempt to produce a perfectly true—that is, flat and uninflected—surface. Yet their material qualities were subsidiary to their optical effect: acting as mirrors, they improved the appearance of anything glimpsed in them. Meyer went on to make a series of monochromatic red lacquer paintings on stretched butcher

Harry Fritzius has been typecast as a shamelessly wayward Romantic fabulist, laying his heart bare in the wrong epoch. But he is really as timely as any other post-History history painter. In pursuit of a grand manner, he has run up against a sublime as knowingly degraded as Ross Bleckner’s and as erratically self-propelled as Julian Schnabel’s. Like theirs, Fritzius’ big statements are based on an attitude of will in place of belief. His low is a kind of mock frenzy set thrashing among great, hoary themes; his high is a poignancy as calibrated as despair. The show here featured anywhere from