Julian Hatton at Elizabeth Harris

Mostly, Julian Hatton's paintings are smallish windows that afford intimate views of an abstract landscape constructed of effulgent, generously fauvist hues and expansive compositions held in check by a square format. Modest in their stake in contemporary art discourse, they demonstrate an artist setting limits and finding within them a satisfying degree of freedom. Nearly all of the 15 paintings Hatton showed here are 24 inches square; just two are larger (all works 2005 or 2005-06).

The paintings vary in the type of view offered. Woody V presents a blue flowerlike form in the center foreground, its petals brushed with a duskier purple and drizzling red. Beyond is a radical drop-off into a hot-pink sea, a horizon of small, distant hills and a painterly, cloud-flecked sky. The feeling that we are being taken from here to there, from near to far, has to do with Hatton's expert ability to construct scale. He nests the flower in a purple patch on a gray ground, and frames it so that the flower looms large before the faraway vista. More jammed forward and tilted up is the view in Channelling, with its bright green road snaking up a steep, equally bright blue hill, or the even more airtight Yoga, with a big, hot flower at the left and sinuous, curving, much more abstract forms that remain in a shallow area up front. On the other hand, in a work like Tree Line, it is as if we were perched in mid-air high above a great expanse, with nothing to interrupt our free visual access to the distance. There, a red hill tapers into pink and disappears into a nebulous blue sea and sky.

The meandering of the road in Channelling is a trajectory that Hatton seems to like. Many of his paintings possess one or more such thick, colorful, doubly functioning lines that not only are recognizable elements of a scene but also serve to either link or separate pictorial planes. They can be a treelike form, as in Run-Off, where a silvery trunk effects a Matissean bifurcation between a daylight world of turquoise and a penumbral one of midnight blue and purple. In the larger (52-by-61-inch) painting Big Hill, dominated by a jutting, Avery-like yellow bluff, the meandering line is shoved down to the bottom of the picture, creating a ribbon of turquoise that must be a river. In all his paintings, Hatton shows a sensitive touch in his application of color, which is rarely unmodulated and given a near animist quality through the seeming inhale and exhale of his brushstrokes.

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