Kadar Brock

Night Time Is the Right Time, Radar Love, and Electric Avenue (all works 2007) were the largest and most arresting pictures on view in Kadar Brock’s recent solo exhibition of abstract paintings, “You Only Live Once.” And despite their sentimentalizing pop-music titles, there was indeed the danger of meeting a clangorous end from cardiac arrest when initially confronted by this discordant mélange of techniques, styles, and colors.

First drawn to the canvases’ garish fluorescent yellows and pinks, the eye then wanders anxiously among an array of layered, juxtaposed, and overlapping geometric shapes. But sustained comparative viewing of the three pictures gradually allows their disorienting jumbles of surfaces and color combinations to resolve themselves into a pictorial vocabulary distinguished by surprising delicacy and sophistication. The cast of characters includes relatively rational,

— Dan Adler