When tasked with explaining Xylor Jane’s paintings, writers often start with the numbers. They explain that Jane uses magic squares, prime palindromes, and counting spirals to construct her systematic, grid-based paintings of geometric forms and numerals. They often comment on the exactitude of her nearly lenticular application of brightly hued pigments and wrap it all up with references to the transcendent, the occult, the magical, or the cosmic. This pairing—matter and spirit—has been identified by several art historians as the special paradox of modern painting. In her 1978 essay “Grids,”

Caitlin Keogh’s artworks narrate the unfinishable story of living in a female body. In “Waxing Year,” her show at Overduin & Co., she presented twenty paintings and collages that revealed how women create themselves while being fractured, unraveled, and trammeled by oppressive forces. In Waxing Year 3, 2020, Keogh paints a kind of existential vision board. Its focal point, a trompe l’oeil postcard of a broken classical sculpture of a walking woman, is “pinned” to the far-right side of the canvas, so that the statue looks as if it might wander off the painting’s stage. Nearby are the weft and

For the inaugural show at Chris Sharp’s new, eponymous gallery, Emma McIntyre presented a lush, terrifically vital suite of abstract paintings that evoke the seasons and their elemental atmospheres. Made with oils that she brought to California when she moved there from New Zealand last year, they represent a continuity of palette—especially in those acid brights that glow from within, as well as in the more punctual interference of small fluorescent-orange polka-dot floaters (sunspots?) that commingle with dusty polluted violet-tinged grays and an assortment of pinkish browns. The works also