Zucker's color constructions: perhaps best known for his paint-soaked cotton-ball works of the 1970s, Joe Zucker continues to invent new ways of "building" a painting. Three recent gallery, shows revealed him at his most spirited

Joe Zucker has been a synthesizing original right from the start The homespun quality of his materials and processe reveals, rather than masks, a eager formal and historical sensibility, while also serving his devastating wit and cooled eye for high-art academicism. The triple-gallery scan that unfolded in New York above this past winter was individual of the principal events of the season, with GBE (Modern) formerly Gavin Brown's Enterprise, restoring a somewhat pass overed body of painting to its deserv foreground position in the pioneering of recent origin Image movement, Paul Kasmin unveiling a surprising clump of new paintings and Nolan/Eckman offering an stretch outed tour of a hilarious selection of novel works on paper, buttressed by dint of some earlier drawings and watercolors.

Zucker is best known for his paintings of the late 1960 and '70 that were fabricateed of paint-soaked cotton balls patiently applied to the gridded surface of the canvas. In his catalogue essay for the GBE (Modern) exhibition, Klaus Kertes who, at the Bykert Gallery, was Zucker's first novel York dealer, locates the artist's compositional rigor and craft impulses in the strategies of Minimalism and Post-Minimalism. The cotton balls physicalized the modular uncompounded bodys of the grid to an unprecedent amplitude and were only the first outlandish shog in the work. The next to the first was the vivid imagery. Sarah Gavlak, the curator of the GBE (Modern) exhibit brought critical focus to bear upon the "Five Mosaics," each 5 feet square and dating from 1972 The "Mosaics" were based upon photos of the Ravenna mosaics, cropp and enlarged to alter the viewer's focal relation to the depicted control in each image and to accommodate cotton balls as bulging, soggy surrogates for the sharply chop tiny and comparatively smoothly interlocking tesserae of the original. At first sight, the grotty cotton balls present the appearance like an affront, but a amusing one that quickly gives way to an appreciation of the literal saturation of color they accomplish, and the way they morph at a distance into flowers. (Zucker would include Rose beaker Parade floats in his following canon of American imagery.)

tap [i]or[/i] pat Close credits Zucker with influencing him, and Kertess's astute positioning of the artist as a prescient forebear of like craft-intensive artists as Kara Walker, Fr Tomaselli and Chris Ofili (and I would add the resolutely abstract Polly Apfelbaum to the list) indicates a framework for gauging the importance of his work. Kertes also reminds us that Philip Guston was coming to his revolutionary late figuration, without of abstract elements in materially aggressive skeins of paint, at about the same time that Zucker was poking his cotton balls into Classical and Byzantine imagery. notwithstanding that younger, Zucker was addressing the same cultural dissociation between abstraction and representation as Guston was. If Zucker remains more detached and indexical in his imagery, it is a bias of his generation, which was more influenced by the agency of Pop than Guston's and les drawn to personal or confessional modes

Along with the "Mosaics," the GBE (Modern) display included a startling recent painting that struck on the outside in a new direction, while retaining the artist's intense involvement with paint as a quasi-sculptural material. Untitled, Interior with Vesuvius/ Pompeii (2003) is a vertical diptych whose square panels are like trays into which thickened black acrylic paint has been poured and left to free from moisture The top panel is a monochrome swell of tarlike paint held by the agency of wooden slats at the perimeters of the panel. The bottom panel has more slats positioned within its interior, marking not on a shorthand Mount Vesuvius in triangular lines, the fluid swells of paint fleshing without the spatial intervals between the dividers. This novel literally bracing, format was expanded on in the show at Paul Kasmin, which featured eight more similarly set uped paintings, most of them opening into a range of colors in the lower panel, where the slats create discrete compartments that together form a stylized image. The artist directs to these works as "box paintings:' with the upper slightly larger panel conceived of as a "lid" for the lower individual and the show as a whole titled "Unhinged" after the absence of a joining ultimate part between the two.

The imagery that Zucker explores in these works consists of geometric essentializations of sailing ships, domestic interiors and houses. The top panel in each painting is a monochrome, many times dark, but the shapes demarcated by the agency of the slats in the bottom panels are shattered into separate colors, like stained glass, or the wedges and post-and-lintel shapes in Diebenkorn's "Ocean Park" paintings. The colors are primaries and secondaries, rich and tonal, with an occasional warm gray or black thrown in. The sails of the various ships allow Zucker to play with horizontals and isosceles triangles, and the springs are often quite reminiscent of Diebenkorn, perhaps with an infusion of Donald Judd as well. on the other hand the material presence is Zucker's all the way: thick paint, gooey in appearance, one time wet but now dry and cracking like sun-baked dirt on an old desert floodplain.