The rigor of his work comes from an internal life, but the materials are never subjugated to this private world, rather they are entwined together, like a perfect marriage of differences

Being in a room full of Philip Guston’s paintings is like time traveling—back to both the artist’s own era in which the work was made, and to my first attempts to make abstract work.

Painters tell themselves stories in order to keep painting. In the case of Mary Weatherford, a Los Angeles-based artist, the stories are connected to specific places and her visual memories of them.

It might seem counter-intuitive to begin a review of an abstract painting show by discussing realism. Especially now, when abstract painting is everywhere, from the Museum of Modern Art’s contentious survey The Forever Now, to artist-run spaces in Brooklyn, and the white cube galleries of the Lower East Side.

It’s important to remember that, unlike in life, no one gets hurt on the stage of painting. Some artists choose to reveal the scaffolding, lights, and dark box of this stage, while others conceal it as best they can. Tomer Aluf belongs in the first category: his paintings present a wide-open and generous stage, dandified with a touch of black magic.

Language is integral to painting’s structure. Of all the art forms, painting is at once the most archaic and the most supremely socialized—it comes to us through centuries of babbling dialogue, entrenched in history and myth, and resplendent with references to other paintings and the civilizations that grew around them.

Richard Aldrich’s solo exhibit of twenty paintings at Bortolami presents a duel between the artist’s heavy sensibility and a selection of light experiments in abstract painting.

New York’s fall art season is in full swing and you would never know that our country is on the precipice of an historic presidential election. Kent Gallery’s current exhibition, Entre Chien et Loup (“between dog and wolf”), gives itself fully to this crepuscular moment in American politics.

From afar Ruth Root’s painting is not easily recognizable as painting. Its slick surface calls to mind metal, plastic, or some unknown medium of the future. Ultra thin, brightly colored, variably shaped aluminum set flush against the gallery wall creates the impression of an object naturally merging with the wall space.

To find Nyehaus, an elegant “project space” elusively located on the eighth floor of the National Arts Club, is tantamount to time travel.

“Collecting is a little bit like making love. You don’t know who your perfect partner is going to be. And you really don’t make a choice that way.”

The cartoon-serious urgency of titles such as “I Got a Job to Do” and “You Would Not Listen When I Told You,” are a welcome invitation into the world of a radically fresh 73-year-old painter, who is not as well-known as he should be on the East Coast.

A portrait emerges from a collage of one-liners and innuendoes of the author as a young intellectual with bohemian leanings.

One could describe Sabrina to those who never met her as a J.D Salinger character, a brilliant precocious individual. A true New Yorker who loved the city and its people unequivocally, with an enormous appetite for life, she directed her energy to describing her adopted home.

The eight paintings in Stephanie Campos’ solo debut at Anna Kustera are at once rough and tumble objects and elegant meditations on modernism’s romance with the sublimity of the square.

In the early 1960’s Milan Kundera, a recent émigré from Czechoslovakia living as an exiled intellectual in Paris, discovers first hand the inescapable tidal force literature exerts over national consciousness and personal identity.

Andy Warhol’s fear of death as “the most embarrassing thing that can happen to you,” appears to be unfounded in the wake of Ric Burns’ operatic four-hour film.

“The only language that can be called ‘language’ without qualification is the language of natural reality.” —Pasolini

Marcel Cohen’s In Search of a Lost Ladino: Letter to Antonio Saura, translated by poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein, is a memoir that meditates on the possibility of a personal and historical recovery through the act of translation.

Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader, edited by Benjamin Hedin, is a collection of literary and journalistic essays, poems, and speeches by Dylan scholars, rock critics and connoisseurs. Like the beat paperbacks and pocketbook existentialism collections that Dylan might have carried with him as a young escapee to New York, Studio A is a portable key to a secret world, not dark yet but getting there.