In an art landscape populated by chalky paintings made by people who don't care enough about their medium to learn how to use it, crowded alongside paintings based on photos by people who think paintings are just images, it shouldn't be surprising that the gallery-going masses are titillated by a painting with a nice surface.

Rebecca Morris’s current show at Regen Projects, titled simply #34, after its place in the sequence of solo shows that constitutes the artist’s career evinces a painter who, having reached a certain stage of maturity, looks to take stock of the work she’s produced. How does it reflect her understanding of painting? What has held up and what is yet to convince?

The further one surrenders to the compositional dynamics in each work, the more archetypal or elemental they seem to become. They are classically modernist in this sense, distilling form into an essential image, a snapshot of a prototypical aesthetic idea. This seems resonant with the glyph theme in their titling. Juxtapositional interventions — in this case Hurley’s sticks — resolve into a formal irreducibility.

“I’m not fit to be a mother. There’s something else I’d have to do first — to change myself from a doll to a real human being.” With these words, Nora Helmer (Sarah Wharton) leaves her husband Torvald (Stephen Dexter) at the end of Royston Coppeneger’s new translation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House (2024).

Often, you'll hear a painter mutter enviously while looking at a painting something along the lines of ”Damn. He just did whatever the hell he wanted.” Variations of this phrase were doubtlessly uttered many times over the last month throughout the adjoining galleries of David Zwirner’s 19th Street location, where Raoul de Keyser’s paintings hang on the walls, their apparent haphazardness inoffensively contrasting with the sky-lit gallery space.

Caesura editors Patrick Zapien and Gabriel Almeida talk to Elisa Jensen about her practice.

Caesura editors Patrick Zapien and Gabriel Almeida talk to Jeane Cohen about her practice.

On December 11, 2022, Caesura editors Gabriel Almeida and Patrick Zapien hosted a live-streamed conversation with Bloomington, Indiana-based painter Peter Shear.

On November 20, 2022, Caesura editors Gabriel Almeida and Patrick Zapien hosted a live-streamed conversation with Chicago-based painter Will Gabaldón.

On November 13, 2022, Caesura editors Gabriel Almeida and Patrick Zapien hosted a live-streamed conversation with Bristol-based painter David Abbott.

There is a richness in color and fullness of form in these works that drew me into them immediately, and held me there. Within them, colors and shapes seem to crumble and grind together, the complexions plow through each other and themselves.