The Brooklyn Rail

Given the terms “abstract” and “abstraction” have come to be used interchangeably, it is important to note that Tom McGlynn’s paintings are not “abstractions.” Neither derived nor distilled from an external resource that he has willfully distorted, as in the case of Piet Mondrian’s “Plus and Minus” series, McGlynn’s instead are “abstract”—constructed as autonomous, self-referential visual propositions arising in the arrangement of his color-forms as ends in themselves.

A typically recent painting presents horizontally or vertically-oriented rectilinear shapes in solid colors on a monochromatic white or a muted color ground. The rectangles rarely touch, or reach the edges of the support. The sole exception is the diptych Force Major (2025), in which a blue squarish rectangle aligns precisely with the inner edge where the two panels meet. The surface, though restrained, never veers toward industrial austerity. Seen up close, nuanced brushwork and subtly calibrated edges convey the sense that each form has been continually refined through visceral readjustment.

The resulting compositions—though often repetitive variants verging on the formulaic—refuse to settle into either an ideal order or a self-conscious disorder. Each color-form appears intuitively or empirically positioned, yet precisely balanced within a tentative, shifting equilibrium. If there is an analogy or metaphor at work in McGlynn’s practice, it lies in the relation between part and whole, the individual and the collective—each discrete form maintaining autonomy while participating in a larger field of interdependence.

The singularity and irresolution of each final image forestall any effort to situate McGlynn neatly within a neo-modernist framework. His deadpan seriousness should neither be mistaken for modernist sincerity nor dismissed as postmodern irony; rather, it operates through a simultaneous embrace of both, sustaining a productive tension between earnestness and self-critical detachment. McGlynn leverages this indeterminacy as the generative core of his work.

Unlike Stanley Whitney or Josh Smith’s neo-gestural compositions, Peter Halley’s pop theatrics, or Philip Taaffe’s neo-ornamental appropriations—all of which index recognizable stylistic traditions—McGlynn’s project is notably free of claims to either authenticity or irony. His abstract imagery engages the present ambivalently, acknowledging its uncertainty as both the subject and the condition of painting. While early geometric abstract art was often utopian and universal in its ambitions, McGlynn’s work is defined by contingency and hybridity, remaining in active negotiation with its own history and relevance.

In another context, his rectilinear forms might seem to allude to digital architectures, information networks, or the serial multiplicity of screen-based perception. McGlynn resists such associations, with a visual logic that remains resolutely intuitive—privileging direct, embodied experience over any reference to mediated phenomena. His straightforwardness avoids both parody and sentimentality; instead, he sustains a quizzical stance that complicates categorical boundaries and invites active engagement with painting’s unsettled condition as it unfolds in real time. Seen in this context, McGlynn’s compositional willfulness takes coherent shape: his rectangles operate less as parts within a system than as individuated agents negotiating presence within a tenuous, open field.

Remaining open to continual adjustment, McGlynn transforms repetition into a generative principle, a painterly counterpart to Donald Judd’s modular rigor where variation arises through disciplined reiteration. McGlynn displaces this into the realm of the perceptual and cognitive. In turn each placement—whether intuitive, empirical, or procedural—underscores his refusal to engage in an endgame logic in which painting is a self-enclosed, terminal system repeating its own conditions to exhaustion.

What might initially appear patterned or conventional is instead continuously unsettled, resisting assimilation or presenting itself as a reaction to received ideals. This tension—between formula and idiosyncrasy, sameness and irreducible difference—sustains the abstract as an open-ended, contingent, and provisional field of inquiry. In this, he shares an affinity with Burgoyne Diller, whose eccentric adherence to Mondrian’s neoplasticism transformed geometric precision into a site of subtle deviation and play.

The deviations in McGlynn’s work enact a dialectic between inherited modernist aspirations and their postmodernist critique. The legacy of modernism offers both an aspirational standard and a set of conceptual limitations, while postmodernism’s deconstructive energies threaten to empty the work of content and significance. Thus McGlynn appears intent on recasting abstract painting as a hybrid space where content, contingency, and variability are both threats and resources.

Oscillating between analytic structure and sensory immediacy, McGlynn’s works foreground their dual status as a “signifier” of abstract conventions and as “meta-signifier” of his cognitive and aesthetic processes. On one level, they map geometric relations of intervals, proportions, and colors; on another, they operate as meta-critical inquiries examining how painting today can still express the sensible. By emphasizing paradoxes such as closure/continuity, sameness/difference, and signifying/meta-signifying, McGlynn sustains a double vision that is simultaneously analytic and affirmative. His negotiation with geometric abstract painting’s history allows him to carry modernism’s unfinished project forward under persistently contingent conditions of postmodernism.

At this juncture, the demands placed on the viewer become more layered. First, one tracks between support and surface, the formal relationships of color, edge, optical illusion, and the interaction. Then, at a cognitive level, one encounters the abstract’s capacity for repetition and difference, for iteration and improvisation. These paired axes generate a field of critical tension neither fixed nor free but suspended between determination and discovery. As a result, McGlynn’s works resist settling into either decorative patterns or conceptual constructs and instead present themselves as ongoing inquiries shaped as much by social and historical forces as by subjective and formal concerns into what is viable, permissible, or possible within a realm of abstract painting.

This resistance to a finite “aboutness” in turn shapes McGlynn’s broader strategy. Consequently, his works read as both disciplined and intuitive, asserting objectivity as well as self-reflectivity. These generative polarities transform repetition of form into a conceptual engine, an instrument for sustained critical continuity. While McGlynn’s paintings are determinedly formalist, they are distinctly non-Greenbergian, marked neither by closure, rules, nor historical finality, but by the provocative opening of restrained possibility. Through this recursive inquiry, they operate as both analytic diagrams and poetic musings, intent on sustaining the abstract as a generative site where thought, perception, and the sensible remain productively unsettled.