For those who study the historical fate of Paul Cezanne, the ramifications of his respect for Nicolas Poussin become central.

A gallery that hands magnifiers to viewers must be anticipating the question, “What is it?” From a customary viewing distance, the images that Ewan Gibbs presents, composed of marks of graphite and ink as well as pricks of a pin, are easy enough to decipher—as images. They represent views of familiar New York City landmarks, contour maps of Texas, and station codes from Texas Amtrak. 

From around 1990, Whitten composed most paintings additively, joining small units of acrylic tile in a mosaic-like manner. In some works, a variable spray or powder of white on a black ground differentiates the elements. Individually, such reflective units evoke galactic space as well as the time-travel that might be required to pass through the inky depths of one tile into the abyss of its digital neighbor. “I am a digital expressionist,” Whitten wrote in 1994. This was expressionism that lacked the usual analog continuity of gesture.

If all our experience and learning, both sensory and conceptual, has brought us (the world) to its present situation, then will learning still more along the same lines lead to a remedy? Or should we learn in a different way, as if occupying a different self?

I responded to Richard Serra’s art from the start—my start with art, not his, for he was a few years older and, I suspect, forever more clued-in to what might be possible as “art.” My immediate appreciation of Richard’s work was due to my generation somehow being primed for it, unconsciously attuned to art that presented viewing as a process rather than as an image.

A passage from a Judd interview of 1987 explains why he rejected Stella’s practice: “Frank … transforms painting into bas-relief, which is still an old-fashioned approach.… If painting has a totality, and it likely does, it resides in flatness…. As for three-dimensional work, it should be three-dimensional. In other words, you take the two categories and you push them as far as possible. Which leaves Frank in the middle of nowhere.”