Future Perfect This exhibition is divided into two bodies of recent work. The first group is the Register series; the second group is The Day Before Tomor- row. The recent paintings and watercolors build directly on work done in the past few years, but take matters a step further, amplifying the struc- tural complexity of the preceding paintings and adding multiple colors and various recognizable forms. As with the earlier work, these paintings deal with architectural space and orderings – presenting themselves as shifting combinations of plan and elevation. They are resolutely flat and planar, yet evoke three-dimensional space by overlaying and perspective, as well as employing the property of colors to advance or recede. Of particular interest to me are those architects, designers, and artists – peo- ple like Le Corbusier, Fernand Léger, the Italian Futurist, Antonio Sant’Elia, the 18th century visionary architect, Claude Ledoux, and Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa, the designers of the ultramodern Brasilia, who envisioned (rightly or wrongly) a utopian future that could be both expressed and encouraged by visual means. Their optimism, which was so often undercut by reality, has within it an implicit irony and pathos, as well as a kind of exalted silliness and grandiosity. The stubborn passions that drove them – their love of the machine, faith in science, and belief in progress and rationality – were bound to lead to I asked Richard Kalina to send me a few quotable remarks about his new work, and was pleased, although not at all sur- prised, to receive an explan- atory text that speaks for itself with the clarity of exposition not only typical of his writing but requiring no further words from me. Except that it bears mention that the works in this show exemplify the intelligence, curiosity and creativity that have inspired the many lines of inquiry he has pursued since we began working together so many years ago in 1993. jill weinberg adams