Throughout his career, Mel Bochner has signaled a stance on contemporary painting that has often placed him at odds with the medium’s exploration of illusionistic space as well as with the conventions associated with Abstract Expressionism. For his current show at TOTAH, ALL SALES FINAL!, Bochner skirts easy dichotomies like figuration/abstraction by making language an integral part of each work. The paintings on view (composed of enamels, styrofoam set in relief, and acrylics) refer to themselves as much as they allude to pressing social realities.

Richard Jackson often gets referred to as a performance painter; and while there’s some truth to this, I think it’s more interesting that he works in and around the gestural properties of painting—often liberating paint and pigment from the direction of the artist’s hand entirely. It would be inaccurate to classify him as a “digital” artist, yet his work uses technology to extend (and often complicate) the limits of what viewers might understand as an organized and balanced composition.

Jeffrey Grunthaner is a writer, artist, and curator based in Brooklyn. Their articles, reviews, poems, and essays have appeared via Drag City Books, BOMB, American Art Catalogues, Folder, artnet News, Hyperallergic, and other venues. Recent curatorial projects include the reading and discussion series Conversations in Contemporary Poetics at Hauser & Wirth Publishers, New York City, and Daniel Turner; Drawings and Sculpture, at Spoonbill Studios, Brooklyn.