Andrea Gyorody reviews “Infinity’s Edge” at Nazarian/Curcio, a group show featuring tactile abstraction inspired by nature’s ephemerality.
In a 2003 essay for the Brooklyn Rail, artist Chris Martin questions the notion of abstraction, reframing it not as a withdrawal from the world but as a different mode of attentiveness, one that trades depiction for apprehension. “Abstract painting is not abstract,” he writes, “but is filled with the forms of the world, is filled with cracks in the sidewalk and light off the water and floor plans and solar systems. . . .” Light off the water is precisely what came to mind when I walked into “Infinity’s Edge,” a group show ostensibly presenting abstraction as a vehicle for the ephemeral, and encountered Devin Farrand’s Horizon (Break), 2025. A stunning object made from anodized aluminum and yellow zinc-plated steel, it somehow conveyed both a wild purple sky and, below the horizon line that divides the frontal plane, the iridescent effect of light hitting the oily surface of a puddle. The work was utterly different from a landscape painting that wows through verisimilitude, and yet the pleasure I experienced looking at it came from my gut feeling that it so perfectly captured a serendipitous natural phenomenon, not at the literal level that Photorealism tends to fixate on but instead at the level of tingly recognition, activating a sense memory rather than creating one.
Rachel Mica Weiss’s Reverberation III, 2025, which produces a color gradient with bands of embroidery thread stretched inside a maple frame, also called up nature’s beauty, specifically the liminal moment at dawn when the sky over a body of water grows lighter while the water maintains the darkness and mystery of night. Like Farrand, Weiss renders these humble materials as more than the sum of their parts. This simple conceit results in what could be—if you stand there long enough, as before a Rothko or a Reinhardt—a transcendent experience, or at least a very calming one, trading Matisse’s armchair for an Adirondack.
Many other works in the show tapped into the surreal, a decidedly less comfy mode, but—to stick with the furniture analogy—one that functioned like an analyst’s chaise. Bridget Mullen’s dense Flashe paintings of biomorphic forms with tight, energetic line work read as trippy Seussian illustrations (compliment), also calling to mind a wide range of associations: Raymond Pettibon’s inky comics, Eva Hesse’s machine drawings, and, especially in Knot Kissers, 2024, the inner workings of the incubating pods in The Matrix (1999). Elsewhere, Aaron Garber-Maikovska’s frenetic yet soft painting Instantaneous Architectural Improvisational Play Field w/Passageways, 2024, invoked musical notation and automatic writing with its loose calligraphic scribbles, while Zach Harris explored mirrored shapes and patterns in mixed-media works (including one featuring impeccable wood inlays), that nod to M. C. Escher and the Rorschach test.
Hayley Quentin’s “drawing paintings,” examples of which were also standouts in a 2024 group show at Tanya Bonakdar in Los Angeles, vibrated at a subtler register, offering an experience closer to the meditator’s cushion. Quentin uses watercolor and colored pencil together with the tooth of the canvas to create diffuse, atomized fields of color and light, reminiscent of Odilon Redon and Georges Seurat but without any of the noise of figuration. One, aptly titled A Hot-Breathed Supplicant’s Beg, 2025, appeared as if it had coalesced out of rising smoke, with indeterminate shapes simultaneously cosmic and cellular in scale. Such delicacy requires deftness belied by the work’s remarkable sense of ease.
That deceptive effortlessness was counterbalanced by The Sea I, II,and III, 2025, a group of small oil paintings by Liat Yossifor. Whereas allusions to water in the works by Farrand and Weiss embodied peacefulness and wonder, for Yossifor the ocean represents pure turbulence, with forceful lines from a dragged palette knife interrupting an impastoed layer of silvery gray with smears of umber and sky blue. The lines sometimes cohered into familiar shapes, but just as often fell apart like surf crashing onto the shore, erasing messages carved into sand. The paintings demonstrate one of abstraction’s enduring powers: its capacity to let the concreteness of painterly materials operate both as literal fact and as a proxy for life’s elusive, yet no less real, spiritual experiences.
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