Lari Pittman @ Gladstone Gallery

The paintings of Lari Pittman, on view now at Gladstone Gallery, are reflections on transience in a style unto his own; he may be enamored by a great many things in painting, but his graphically rendered work severs superficial or stylistic ties to the history of painting. Pittman refers to vanitas, a 17th century Dutch still-life genre as a significant influence, while visually he conjures associations with stained glass, textiles, batik, and glossy illustration. Arrangements of kettles, chickens, and humble people, float in his compositional grids. Pittman uses white paint both for re-grounding (to lay on new transparent layers) and also as a primary drawing color. He spills linear webs of paint over the pictures, unifying compositions with flattening single-colored strands, sometimes delaying the reading of the picture as still life. Some of the larger paintings hold out in their complexity for quite some time as his subjects emerge and the busy picture plane gives way into the shallow stage where tight tonal registers and busy mark making demand long (and splendid) untangling. Until November 30.