Peter Zimmermann at Emmanuel Perrotin

In his solo exhibition "Reliance," Peter Zimmermann tackled the tradition of "pure" abstraction. Adopting techniques dear to action and Color Field painters, the German artist bastardized both with astonishing acumen.

His lollipop-colored expanses of epoxy resin poured, dripped or dabbed on virginal canvases would have incensed Clement Greenberg, since they owe as much to Warhol, Peter Halley and Gerhard Richter as they do to Pollock and Morris Louis.

Zimmermann emerged in the late 1980s with highly literal paintings depicting book covers of classic art and cultural theory texts. Faux advertising posters that mixed found images and texts followed soon after. Since the mid-1990s, he has scanned and filtered his source material through computer programs (principally Photoshop), distorting, abstracting and defamiliarizing it in the process. In his recent work, he projects various types of digital images onto canvases, then carefully transcribes and colors them. Digital technology enabled him to reconceive his conceptualist esthetic, offering, he says, "a way out of the 'text trap"' into which he had fallen.

The 20 works in "Reliance" (all 2006) derived from the same method of appropriation, mutation and projection, to which the exhibition's title coyly alluded. The transparency and blurred edges of the overlapping blobs of color that make up S.A.V. or the grand diptych Slope, for example, call up cellular structures magnified under a microscope. The globular and ovoid shapes set against azure and fiery orange grounds in Molecules and Template II suggest similarly enlarged primary life forms. The amorphous, psychedelic planes of Tea, on the other hand, echo views of landscapes, either mountainous or aquatic. Finally, the network of dots constituting Circles and blanketing the amoebalike creatures in Template I and Tem plate II highlight the building blocks (pixels and screen plates) of both contemporary and old-fashioned image production. With its rich luminosity, saturated hues and reflective resin, the artist's distinctly modern medium resembles medieval stained glass.

Zimmermann's efforts are most compelling when he employs a Pop palette on a sizable scale. This became immediately apparent in the final gallery, where a series of 12 small paintings (about 35 by 27 inches each) titled "Perl" hung. Overrun with blacks and blues, these unfortunately murky works were a disappointing end to an otherwise captivating exhibition.

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