Alan Kleiman at Robert Steele

Regarded as a "painter's painter" over his more than 50 years of practice, New York artist Alan Kleiman is known for rigorous monochromatic paintings that have appeared in as many kinds of group exhibitions as there are curatorial positions to claim them. These include shows devoted to work in a single color (red or blue), to purism, to abstract painting or the avant-garde in general, as well as painting about painting and paint as image, the heroic and the poetic. A student of the Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka at his "School of Seeing" in Salzburg in 1956, Kleiman presented New Yorksolo exhibitions at P.S.1 and The Clock-tower in the mid-'80s, Elizabeth Harris in 1995 and O'Hara in 1996. This clearly focused exhibition of recent easel-scale oils on canvas provided a rare opportunity to view seven recent examples of Kleiman's work, dating from 2001 to 2004.

Kleiman pursues a form of abstract and expressionistic painting of such subtle vibrancy that the paintings are frequently assumed to be the work of some latter-day Suprematist in thrall to the monochrome. In fact, each painting results from the accretion of many layers of medium, beginning with applications of colored gesso that is then incrementally altered with a wide palette of oils, the colors incidentally staining the bare, unprimed canvas that wraps around the edges of the stretcher bars. On close examination, the viewer sees that the paintings are entirely incised with the physical record of the artist's gestures, the repeated, confident scoring of the surface and previous layers, a controlled excavation of paints applied wet-on-wet or dry. Here sweeping, razor-thin incisions slash through medium without ever cutting through to canvas. In the exhibition at Steele, intense lighting facilitated the perception of modulated pigment beneath and quickened the retinal experience of the painting as it shimmered with unprecedented color. Kleiman considers each work a representation of "real" or "found" hues: the greens of new grass, the light-suffused, lilac blue of a Tiepolo sky, etc.

The rhythmic interplay of large and small works included here was harmonious. At 58 by 40 inches, the deep purple of Wine Spilt Sky (2001) corresponds to human scale and recalls the intense darkness of a James Turrell installation. A somewhat smaller painting, which only seems to be square, is a vibrant chartreuse over disparate layers of color that together achieve the hyper-fertility of its title, Miracle Grow (2001). The 24-by-20-inch lilac vertical of Tubers Warm Cold Mountains (2002) seems haunted by a blue-purple underpainting, like the flesh of a Peruvian potato. Blossoms in the Dust (2004) achieves a white infused with pale green over shades of purple. Like flowers, these paintings seem attracted to light, even the high-wattage glare of spot lighting. In the even light of sunny days, Kleiman completes the final passages of the paintings as they temporarily hang for that purpose on an exterior wall of a Grand Street loft.

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