James Adley’s canvases are unabashedly Modernist: they exist as indexes of the act of painting, eschewing “readymade” images of both nature and culture. The surfaces of Adley’s paintings are mapped by striated layers of color that interact as compositional events, creating multivalent levels of space. The artist’s movement is embodied in painterly marks created with such implements as rakes, trowels, push brooms, rollers, and squeegees. Adley’s art asserts the body as the mediator of experience, and the trace as the physical remenant of the phenomenal world. He succeeds most when the work is no