Jerome Powers at Margaret Thatcher Projects

"Glue Factory," Jerome Powers's first exhibition in New York, comprised 15 paintings consisting of multiple superimposed layers of Elmer's glue. This artist does not drip the glue, as Mark Tobey had done. Instead, he pours it onto canvases that have been laid flat, creating creamy, somewhat translucent layers. Between them Powers sandwiches hair, or he draws graphite lines on the coats once they dry. Within the flat, perfectly even strata, the drawn lines or collaged strands appear blurrier the deeper they lie. Powers's frequent use of horsehair in this context is movina, aiven that rendered horses were once the key ingredient in most glue.

Significantly, Powers's pictures are reminiscent of the earliest chapters in the history of abstract painting. His pure, minimal compositions recall experiments in Russian Constructivism. Some paintings, with squiggly lines playing off against a monochrome field, are reminiscent of work by the Polish artist Wladyslaw Strzeminski (1893-1952), whose abstractions often feature minute striations.

The large, horizontal Stable (29 by 49 1/2 inches; all works 2003) consists of 18 thin vertical lines arranged at different intervals and running from the top to the bottom of the painting. These tautly stretched lines consist of single strands of horsehair, arranged in an elegant composition that brings to mind the great horizontal tableaux of Barnett Newman. Here, again, less is more. Newman is also brought to mind by Poodle (30 by 24 inches), in which fluffy poodle hair is gathered into a smoky "zip" bisecting the vertical canvas.

More vigorous, curvilinear rhythms are introduced in an untitled medium-size (34-by-28-inch) vertical composition consisting of thin, intersecting arcs that emerge out of and dissolve into the beige layers on which they are drawn. These vectors, lying in different planes, hover between empty exercises in geometric drawing and something more like Frantisek Kupka's rendering of the movements of heavenly spheres.

The configurations in two other untitled works were arrived at largely by accident. In both paintings, a limited number of strands of wavy horsehair were loosely arranged within the pictorial ground, recalling Dadaist exercises in biomorphic chance composition, such as those orchestrated by Arp and Picabia. For one of these paintings, Powers turned to acrylic, creating a gray-green monochrome ground; this painting is also distinguished from the other by its horizontal format and intersecting strands (it measures 24 by 36 inches). Powers's reductive designs playfully reference early works in abstract painting while breaking new territory with their highly creative use of materials.

--Michael Amy

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