Rodney Carswell’s recent paintings are acts of great cunning: they fuse scrupulous craftsmanship with wry sequences of subtle dislocations that call his entire enterprise into question. He typically employs the pristine pictorial language of Modern geometrical abstraction in slightly skewed and amended forms, altered just enough to keep his compositions tense and expectant. As in the work of Robert Mangold, regularity of design becomes the field for surprising formal disjunctions.

Take, for example, 3 Colors Bordering An Irregular Empty Shape, 1991; here, as always, Carswell lifts his surface

John Walker’s recent dilemma is a particularly poignant one. He is a remarkably skilled artist who works in the grand painterly tradition, yet he seems to suspect that that tradition is exhausted—no more than a shadow of its former glory. His work reflects his search for meaning with paint, and his assertion of self through the encounter with the canvas, coupled with the sustained significance of the struggle between form and content, suggests that his approach still affords a certain potential. With each bout with the rectangle, Walker battles himself, and the crux of these paintings rests in