frustration and the embrace of an aestheticized impracticality. Wanting to sim- plify and rationalize, they were drawn nonetheless to beauty and excess, con- flating crispness with hard-headedness, visual logic with social utility. Paintings, especially abstract paintings, with their inherent metaphorical quality and their ability to carry a multiplicity of messages are excellent vehicles for joining mis- matched ends and means – more so than architecture. Paintings can be many (often contradictory) things at once and still remain focused and unruffled. Some questions arise: the paintings in this show may have a machine-like quality, but what is a machine these days? In what space and at what scale do machines operate? What exactly is the built environment today and how do we situate ourselves visually within it? How do the uncertainties of the future fit with our desire for resolution and at least the hope of per- fectibility? If painting is a language, then it has a grammar, both innate and learned. A painter develops a tool kit of formal and historical components. The history is both the culture’s and the artist’s own, the formal elements are the standard ones – color, form, composition, rhythm – available to all. I have tried to arrange and rearrange those pieces into groups of paintings and drawings that will, I hope, touch on something basic yet elusive, and in the process give the viewer pleasure and surprise. richard kalina February 2019