Walls of ruddy oak paneling provided a posh backdrop to Rashid Johnson’s third solo exhibition at Monique Meloche, for which the artist loosely transformed the long narrow gallery into what appeared to be an exclusive black gentlemen’s recreation center, punctuated by rim shot after rim shot of racial spoofs delivered in the form of gauche assemblages. Incorporated in these sculptural configurations were Johnson’s notorious parodic photographs, as well as houseplants, bowls of shea butter, a beige shag carpet, a wicker chair, tacky decorative paintings, sundry brass knickknacks, and more. Taken

Wallace Whitney is alive to the curious allure of gestural abstraction, to the drama and theatricality made possible by painting with a wide and overloaded brush in thick three- or four-foot strokes that can seem impetuous, risky, sudden, bold, unconsciously derived, and—when they work—pictorially inevitable. That model has persisted for some sixty years, the sense of a painting as an intense sequence of real-time decisions—the ultimate fate of the canvas always in doubt, the painter someone functioning under great tension, who, like a jazz musician, must trust that his familiarity with his