Stephen Conroy is a young artist whose work evokes a strange sense of déjà vu. At first sight, walking into a show of his is like happening upon a show of 19th-century paintings . There, in plain black frames, are works showing elements of Georges de Ia Tour—the same limited color range and interest in lighting, but without the obvious religious content; a bit of Joseph Wright of Derby, right down to the depiction of archaic-looking scientific instruments; profile studies that recall Renaissance portraits; and cut-off figures emerging from bathtubs, which hint at Degas. There is no obvious

Those who accuse abstract art of inhumanity are surely right. Yet what they miss is that absolute nonobjectivity is never actually achieved, but remains, even in the most unrelenting formalism, a mere asymptote of the mind, its fantasy of victory over the body. In reality, the recurrence of resemblance is never overcome, and the autonomous properties and logic of color and configuration serve only to catalyze other capabilities of the imagination. To be sure, the elements of painting exact their own demands, yet each formal shift is but an altered threshold toward a new image-advent.

Alan Stocker