Tony Magar at Mike Weiss

The vividly colored, tumbling ellipses that seem to spill through the painterly fields of Tony Magar's recent oils are as esthetically compelling as they are expressive. Their titles allude to such celestial phenomena as constellations, planets, stars, quasars and novas, and their colors are keyed to the spectrum scientifically associated with each. Intense reds, modulated blues and coronas of yellow appear as oval forms, as if to improve upon the conventional representation of astral bodies as round and perfectly formed. Within the finite field of the easel-size canvas, Magar offers a set of imagined conditions beyond telescopic access and equally beyond the geometric forms of Kandinsky (who considered blue a celestial color) and the deep-space cinematic animations of Oskar Fischinger.

Magar refers to the brightly hued starlike objects known as quasars in a 56-by-48-inch painting dated 2004. A lozenge of red--its form defined by a roughhewn aura of intense yellow-appears to float up along the canvas's right edge in an example of the compositional conceit that the painting is a focused passage in endlessly extended space. Quasar's blue appears to recede in a blue-tinted opalescent field, and the thinned medium seems to weep down the length of the painting's surface. Such paint handling is seductive to the eye, and Magar's sensual deployment of elongated, egg-shaped forms is muscular and decisive.

Pegasus and the larger 80-by-66-inch Green Peace II (both 2005) are formally related to each other as though mirrored, with the red field of the former a satisfying complement to the yellow-green ground of the latter. Each is organized around a more or less vertical ellipse of complex blues that extends the length of the canvas as it tends toward intersection with a smaller element of roughly the same shape. As though descending, an orange are appears at the top of the field of Pegasus, while cosmic bits nudge out from the painting's right edge. Both works bear a sympathetic although reductive resemblance to the lyrical, painterly ellipses in Larry Poons's transitional works of the late 1960s, minus Poons's acrylic stain.

Recalling the abyss of a black hole, the 77-by-66-inch Absentee Universe (2004) is dominated by the smaller of its few constituent forms, a black circle rimmed in yellow, white and a scrawl of red that seems to fall away from a field of light. Close at hand, Magar installed Eclipse (2005), one of two painted-wood sculptures in the exhibition, which consists of two white coinlike disks that appear to slide away from each other, tilting from the waist-high pedestal that is part of the ensemble. Born in London in 1934, Magar emerged as a second-generation Abstract Expressionist associated with Mark di Suvero and the founding of Park Place Gallery, which was directed by Paula Cooper in the 1960s. Magar is now based in Taos.

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