The Brooklyn Rail

Robert Storr’s one-man show at Vito Schnabel, Fits and Starts, includes an array of Flashe-on-canvas-on-board abstract geometric works, each executed in 2025. All of the works are untitled and painted on rectangular or square canvases. The bulk of the works take the form of planks; inside, Storr divides the pictorial space into uniform blocks, arranging them into two-dimensional T-, L-, and skew-shaped tetrominoes sequenced within an implied grid format. As was the case in Storr’s geometric abstractions that were exhibited in the summer 2025 three-person show at Peninsula Gallery, Sacred Geometry, the variability of Storr’s formalist exercise remains constrained to palette-based permutations. Like Piet Mondrian and Bart van der Leck before him, Storr mostly works with elemental color arrangements. His ingots generally consist of cardinal-red, gunmetal-silver, and raven-black color schemes, occasionally broken by tangerine or slate-blue squares limned into the margins. In other works, saturated yellow quadrilaterals are gridded over light gray backgrounds.

By way of chromatically regimented planar shapes, Storr endows his unvarying constituent modules with a degree of weight. In so emphasizing and leveling his serial arrangements, Storr licenses both a figure/ground differential and a foreground/background distinction. The empty black and iron right-angled bars that enclose lightly graded geometric stacks effectively function as recessed pockets of space. Flanking these are synthetic-pink, yellow, or cream-white square interruptions, which transform what would otherwise be uniform rectangular blocks into patterns. Unlike the De Stijl artists with whom he is often compared, Storr neither instrumentalizes an illusionistic conception of space nor allows his binary color oppositions to coalesce into worldly homologies indicating material representations. There are neither city grids, stained-glass windows, nor natural motifs analogized in Storr’s gridded sequencing.

One of the most curious aspects of the series on view is Storr’s airy brushwork, which becomes clearer when the works are viewed at close range. This is most vividly apparent in Storr’s darker reds and grays, where unevenly coated strokes, seemingly applied in spasmodic bursts, reveal tonal shifts. Such variable “filling-in” of orthogonal space becomes particularly significant when one is made aware of Storr’s working method, which, per the press release, begins with Storr “creating a drawing on his iPhone and blocking out areas of color.” “This digital study” then serves “as the sketch for the final painting.” Where the precursor digital paintings block together solid-colored pixels, Storr’s canvas-directed transfigurations enjoy significant chromatic variance. Insofar as his configurations are concerned, however, the cubic pieces are regularized and dimensionally consistent, as one might expect from pixelated division. In other words: Storr retains the pixel as a means of scaling and dividing space but dispenses with it as a stable coloring device. As a self-described dyed-in-the-wool modernist, Storr might regard this as a means of contending with the genealogy of abstraction—specifically, post-painterly abstraction and Minimalism’s outgrowth from Abstract Expressionism.

This again motivates the viewer to contextualize Storr’s work in continuity with its most immediate stylistic precursors: chiefly, the De Stijl artists, who similarly segmented space via chromatically elemental blocks. But Storr’s looser facture distinguishes him from many of the antecedent movement’s figureheads. As demonstrated by numerous architectural and design-based works, ranging from Gerrit Rietveld and Vilmos Huszár's collaboration for the 1923 Juryfreie Kunstschau in Berlin to Theo van Doesburg and Cornelis van Eesteren’s Maison Particulière (1923), De Stijl was frequently galvanized by a markedly integrative task: the flat plane, rendered as structural floats, was placed at the service of projective building in three dimensions. As Yve-Alain Bois observes in Painting as Model, however, “This is in direct opposition to Mondrian, for whom the three-dimensional nature of architecture was its inherent flaw.”

Indeed, Storr’s work is far closer to Mondrian’s than to any others within De Stijl, as both seem to regard dimensionality as extraneous. Dissolving and flattening out dynamic spatial fragments into two-dimensional signs, Mondrian’s governing principle was to compress upon a single plane that which art historian Joseph Masheck described in a 1974 article on Mondrian as a controlled “spatial weave,” accomplishing this “by differentiating the densities and overlaps of the separate grids and by overloading the system with more identity than differentiation.” Rather than treating paint simply as paint, Mondrian’s color-based mapping of planes and dashes drew on a structural isomorphism between geometrical elements and worldly referents. In aligning tightly colored rectangles and bands in New York City (1942) and Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43), Mondrian’s sequences indicate objects and structures outside the canvas (e.g., the urban grid of Manhattan). On the one hand, Storr’s choice to work from pixels does suggest that his tetrominoes are representations of digital raster elements; but the tessellated cells, at least in terms of palette, flag, and waver, ultimately produce a kind of distancing effect from their source material.

This is why the most effective works of Storr’s latest series do not hew terribly close to the pixel system. The best paintings on view eschew any possible worldly reference, figuring as studies of planar unity amidst variety. In several such works, all of which use near-square canvases, Storr blocks out large axial T-figures in warm-pastel. These yellow arrangements each subdivide a weathered silvery-lead block, which is itself placed atop a darker slate-gray recess that forms a kind of framing border. In some of the variations, a darker channel of butter-gold abrades the edges of the picture plane; elsewhere, shorter strips of black are placed along the T-shape’s margins, foregrounding the structure’s prominence without invoking dimensionality proper. These are particularly effective because Storr has, throughout his art career, aimed to demonstrate that the birth of postmodernism did not displace modernism.

If we are to take Storr at his word, then the modernist project ought to continue from where it left off during the mid-twentieth century. By the time of Frank Stella’s shaped canvases and Morris Louis’s soaked “Unfurleds,” modernism had ostensibly renounced worldly reference. If the modernist project continues to be viable, then it must traffic in paint qua paint (rather than, say, paint qua pixels). In Storr’s more structurally-oriented exercises, he forgoes the pixel as a uniform spatial unit while transfiguring it into a latent leitmotif that reconstitutes the picture plane as a fillable vacuum. Here we can see Storr contending most directly with the possibility of a residually viable, ongoing modernism.