In 2012, the Brooklyn Rail published “The Four Corners of Painting,” a look at the “general state of painting” by Richard Kalina. In the article, he made the point that the contours of painting are known and that “all forms of paintings are being practiced in roughly equal measure.” Kalina identified four categories in which paintings operate: the Mimetic, the Stylized Mimetic, the Abstract-Mimetic Hybrid and the Fully Abstract, a category he breaks down into four areas, one of which, the Organized Organic, is characterized by what might be called a grammatical approach. This is the space in which the work of both Kalina and Dowell can be found. Kalina has been working with systematic variations within self-imposed criteria of scale, proportion and structural ele- ments. The narrow vertical Parameter paintings have a silhou- etted figure; the horizontal formats of the Kromos series compli- cate and expand those shapes; while the Sector and Counterpart series open themselves to grids, pathways, and keyholes that penetrate the form and cause the figure and ground to freely change places. These chromatically rich compositions reference the plans and elevations of architecture as well as the complexi- ties and pleasures of pattern and decoration, creating in the process a balance of both symmetrical and asymmetrical ele- ments. Working now with oil on linen, a painterly hand is clearly present on the surface. Roy Dowell has suggested that “Kalina and I both deal with democracy in our paintings but deal with it in different ways. He sees the similarities between components and works at a unification, where I take from disparate sources because I see them as having equal value. Coming at democracy from two different directions.” His paintings incorporate a vast field of references, from American modernism, collage, Latin American decorative