The Brooklyn Rail

Rather than take the elevator, viewers might be advised to climb the stairs to one of Alexandre’s upper-level galleries in this elegant townhouse to view Ornithology, an exhibition of paintings and works by Stephen Westfall spanning the past fifteen years. Along the stairwell, viewers encounter the artist’s dramatic, site-specific mural in three sections, Conference of the Birds I, II , and III (all 2025), covering the stairwell wall, a corner area, and the hallway leading to the main exhibition space. Featuring a composition of brightly colored, irregular hard-edge geometric forms, mostly triangles, the approximately 380-square-foot mural corresponds to Westfall’s public artworks such as Perasma I & II; Dappleganger (2018), at the 30th Ave subway station in Queens.

Outside of the artworld or art gallery context, these expansive works are primarily concerned with the movement of the human body. The zigzag arrangement of red, blue, green, and pink triangles in Conference of the Birds II, for instance, echoes not only the architectural structure of the staircase steps themselves, but also the bent knees and heel-toe footfalls of the people using the stairs. The shifting planes and lively geometry of the stairwell installation recalled for me the fractured spaces of Kurt Schwitters’s now-lost environment Merzbau (ca. 1923–37), albeit without the brilliant color.

The suggestion of movement, pulse, and rhythm carries over to the ten oil-and-alkyd canvases and seven gouache-on-paper works featured in the gallery proper. The show’s title, Ornithology, refers to Barnett Newman’s remark that “Aesthetics is for artists what ornithology is for the birds,” and the recurring triangular forms may be seen as abstracted birds’ beaks. Perhaps most importantly, the title alludes to the legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, known as “Bird.” (I happen to have in my digital music library Parker’s 1947–49 collaboration with Miles Davis, Birdsong, which features the improvisational composition “Ornithology”.)

Westfall’s tall painting Jitterbug Waltz (2024)—84 by 43 inches—conveys a visual reimagining of jazz improvisation, in which a vertical progression of zigzag bands and triangles in gold, white, green, blue, and red indeed suggests a raucous sound and a spirited dance just as the work’s title indicates. In this painting, and others on view, the geometric forms seem to project into the space of the room rather than recede into the background of the canvas. Westfall, a self-declared synesthete who is capable of hearing colors, uses facets of dense, saturated hues made with countless layers of pigment. In the show’s title piece and throughout the exhibition, unexpected juxtapositions of colorful triangles—some jarringly contrasting and others tunefully analogous—result in a fragile equilibrium of cacophony and harmony. “I’m not a line person, I’m an edge person,” Westfall said in a recent talk. A certain tension certainly arises along the edges of the geometric shapes. The rhythmic juxtapositions of form and color are often accompanied by a feeling of impending disequilibrium, as if a sudden shift in hue or tone could shatter the seemingly impenetrable and uniformly shallow picture plane.

For me, Westfall’s work often appears as a bridge between early forms of modernist abstraction, from Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, and Theo van Doesburg to current explorations of the expressive possibilities of hard-edge geometric abstraction by contemporaries such as James Little, Odili Donald Odita, and Rico Gatson. I recently studied two works by the early French modernist André Lhote, Hommage à Watteau (ca. 1918), and Arlequin (1930), in which the triangular facets of the subject’s costume vibrate with a similar rhythmic intensity as Westfall’s distinctive geometry. Westfall also shares with his forebears the hope and ambitions of modernism, in which abstraction would be reflective of humanity’s highest ideals and aspirations.