Xylor Jane opened her third solo show at CANADA last week. Based in Massachusetts, but from San Francisco, the last place I saw her work in NYC was at Deitch Projects, where it was included in Constraction, curated by Kathy Grayson.

All of the new paintings are on wood panel, and most are square in shape. Each hosts grid systems of spectral color that build fields of shimmering and vibrating shapes, or tightly periodic cellular units and patterns. The latter approach, seen in Gates, one of the strongest pieces, is like a perpetually repeating Tetris game filtered through a broken record/ broken record/ broken record/ broken record.

Xylor Jane, Bombinating

The geometric incandescence of these paintings beacons you toward them, and they tease you with promise of pattern, inviting and luring you into the flickering fields to track the patterns, to see where and when repetition occurs. And as you begin to perceive the formulas that foster repetition, you begin to detect numerical forms rendered in round pixels of color, usually bold and from the tube, or iridescent and mixed with silver. Looking closer, you notice the neatly drafted grid lines spanning the panel surface. And closer still, you notice tiny handwritten characters, usually numbers, which perhaps guide the artist through these dense matrices of Skittles and braille. This gives these painters’ paintings some sugar for Conceptual-minded viewers, because those eggheads get a chance to peek into the thought process that generated the paintings.

Some paintings reflect themselves: in a binary manner, the left side mirrors the right, or top to bottom [(or vice versa) (or vice versa), respectively]. Others unfold into quadrants, each reflecting its border neighbors. This relationship between quadrants restricts randomness, chance, and arbitrary decisions. The pixels were plotted according to a system, and repeat in neighboring quadrants, reflexively bound and determined to their location.

Xylor Jane, Selfsame

But how does Xylor Jane decide on her sequences of colors? According to the artist, the ROYGBIV spectrum coincides with calendar dates and prime numbers. Some paintings even scroll lists of prime numbers. I don’t know exactly how she connects the numbers and dates to colors, but it is apparent that she has a system, and that is good enough for me. The paintings function to track and document passage of time, or progressions of numbers. (How great that this show follows on the heels of the recent show and review of On Kawara’s One Million Years, experientially tedious but historically necessary.) Thus, the paintings gradually reveal both sequence and development, yet they also preclude development within themselves, because the grid/quadrant/reflection rules restrict all ranges of variation possible. Each section can be only what the others determine it to be.

They make you dizzy and confused, and never settled with your perception of the painting. Unable to conclusively locate their edges, we are handicapped; the painting might as well be moving on its own. The optical dazzle identifies these paintings as Op, and therefore psychedelic. (David Rimanelli wrote in Artforum (May 2007) about Op art and 1960s psychedelia.) On a trippy vibe, the paintings reach for otherworldy engagement. But they simultaneously keep a foot in another extraterrestrial system, that being mathematics. Math is prior to perception and its independent relations persist whether or not we are paying attention. Xylor’s work contorts to straddle both psychedelic para-perception and rational epi-perception. The paintings are like talismans of extraempirical dimensions. Maybe that’s why the show is called N.D.E., standing for Near Death Experience: the show takes us to the precipice of alternative realities.

Aaron Johnson, Bad Precedent, 2007

In that same Artforum article, David Rimanelli designates the apparent Op resurgence as a “blip.” But is there a substantial Op art revolution? Constraction was just once example. Deitch offers another with the current Ben Jones show, and earlier projects by Assume Vivid Astro Focus (Happy Birthday, Eli!). Painter Aaron Johnson uses op patterns. Ara Peterson’s painted wood sculptures induce vertigo as much as wonder. And up-and-coming David Malek opens a show next week that looks likely to Op all the place.

David Malek, Astronaut Food, 2009

Akiyoshi Kitaoka, Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavilion album cover

Bradford Cox, Deerhunter Cryptograms album cover

IMAGES: CANADA Gallery, Stux Gallery, Smith-Stewart Gallery, Anonymous

Peter Doig at Gavin Brown’s kept me rapt in the gallery for over an hour. I had to go home for a nap afterward.

Peter Doig: Music of the Future

The paintings are nocturnes telling of otherworldly landscape, Trinidad, where labor is scarce and leisure abundant. Maracas features a ziggurat of improbably giant speakers. The figure perched at one corner goes blurry and formless, as if the thundering bass is vibrating him to vapor. In House of Flowers, a diaphanous bubble man seems to materialize from a windblown stream of fluttering cherry blossoms and/or bubbles. Throughout his scumbled torso, splendid highlights mirror the neighboring fields of pink and yellow. The bubble man is reflective in surface, and based on the body language, reflective in mental state. The hallucinatory image vibes with the trippy, foggy quality of Doig’s landscapes, and let’s remember that one of Doig’s earlier works shows a figure tripping out on the ice beneath him. That work’s title is Blotter. Incidentally, House of Flowers is also the title of a Truman Capote musical that introduced Americans to the steel drum, an instrument indigenous to Trinidad.

Peter Doig, Blotter (1993)

In Untitled (Ping Pong), a pot-bellied, mustached, balding man swings a paddle, not connecting with the white ball that whizzes by and crosses in front of his chest. The man’s opponent does not appear, but balls don’t hit themselves, so we can surmise his presence via the ball, just as we can see wind by the motion of leaves on trees. The ball is the surrogate of the “other” player. (In an adjacent room, preliminary watercolors reveal the partner to be a woman; she is primitively rendered as a long-haired Gumby with gravity-defying breasts.)

I love this painting because the distorted space juggles perspectives and flirts with aligned edges; I just have to geek out over the games Doig plays. (You shouldn’t watch.)

First, we can agree that the pictorial eye level is the top of the table. The table surface does not diminish, but rather levels out, compacting the table top to a flat white strip. That strip echoes the matrix of strips behind it. Green paint clears its throat and reminds us of its presence by dripping into the strip of white. And just above that be-dripped white strip, the grid shares its single row of uniform, black units. Tic tac toe.

Doig, Untitled (Ping Pong), (2006-8)

(In real life, my camera does this annoying thing where it seeks out and focuses on the hardest edges and starkest contrast, at the expense of the actual subject, such as a friends face. This painting must use the same camera, because the hard-edged grid of black, blues, and gray seems most in focus, while the trees behind and the game in front seem blurred.)

-So we know where eye level is, but we don’t know where to stand. We can’t see where the table legs meet the ground. We can’t see the ground at all, so we have no idea where and how that strange grid wall has materialized. (What is that, anyway? It reminds me of something…) Doig has hidden these important clues in the flat, shimmering field of bright green that seems to creep onto the canvas like mold, at least as much as it renders tall grass. Consequently, it’s unclear whether this is one-point perspective or two-point.

The table legs are unequally spaced apart. The left-side legs are closer together than the right-side legs are together. Our point of view is from the left of the canvas. And the way the net dodges the exact middle of the grid wall makes the scene dynamic. We are in motion, tracking the movement of the ball, at this frozen instant when one player is losing the match (again, a photographic phenomenon). We don’t know if the man is winning because the woman hit the ball too far, or if the woman is winning because the man missed the ball. Either way, we see it Happening Now.

In one-point perspective, the table legs at each end of the table would appear closer to their mates. In two-point, we would see more of the net stretching across the table. Yet we don’t see that, because the net does not diminish.

Because eye level is at the table surface, we are looking up at the pong player. His torso is foreshortened; we know that if he were standing upright, the distance from chin to waist would be much greater. He is stooped over, and given the perspective, he is nearly diving.

So Doig is messing with our depth perception. Is he trying to simulate what happens when I lose at ping-pong (or basketball, or billiards? That depth perception has failed? He is confusing me in order to transmit the players’ confusion.

Hey, you show an analytic painting; you get an analytic reading.

IMAGES: Tate London, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise

My ears began to hurt, but I didn’t want to be seen covering my ears. That would be so uncool! And I can survive this. I survived the 17 minutes of noise that My Bloody Valentine uses as a senses-shattering climax to their live show. That tsunami of noise could split eardrums of leather. When I saw them, vibrations from the guitars knocked loose a plug from its socket, causing Kevin Shields’ guitar to go mute for several minutes.

Last night’s performance at Bortolami Gallery was nowhere near that kind of volume, but it was equally difficult, and did embrace feedback as a fundamental tool. The gallery had described this as “a music performance.” When I saw guitars, drumsticks, and a mixing board, I was ready to rock! I was already thrilled to be surrounded by Rich Aldrich’s painting show, his first in Bortolami’s colossal cavern. The paintings are assiduously intellectual and adventurously unconventional, subjugating brush gestures as just another technique, no better than cutting the canvas, gluing clothes and postcards to it, scratching in figural images, or leaving white space untouched. And the pair of portraits, Looking and Looking with Mirror Apparatus are rumored to depict John Cale. I was ready to avant-rock!

Stefan Tcherepnin (l) and Richard Aldrich (r)

Rich and experimental composer Stefan Tcherepnin played their instruments in almost every other way possible. That is, they shook, struck, stepped on, bumped, and slapped the guitars; but they did not strum the strings. Rich shook and waved his guitar around the feedback field, modulating the squeal, which made his instrument more like a theremin. Stefan banged his guitar against the amplifier, allowing the knobs to pluck the strings. Between the effects pedal, the microphones, the guitars, and the amplifiers, most of the music had already been generated before the artists lifted a finger.

Man/Machine: Stefan Tcherepnin

Jeff Perkins, an artist whose light shows have illuminated the music of the Velvet Underground and Grateful Dead, and who pioneered Fluxus alongside Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, and George Maciunas, conducted a fugue of color slides. Four slide projectors atop a primitive platform -just a slab of wood on saw horses – beamed onto the wall numerous geometric, bright, monochrome arrangements of dots, crosses, hatch patterns, ovals and more. Motors positioned between the projectors on the platform powered two spinning discs, made of humble materials, maybe just plastic sheets taped together. These spinning discs spun through the projectors’ beams, intermittently eclipsing the images, and chopping – the way jet engines do geese – the steady images into a flashing sequence.

Let There Be Light: Jeff Perkins

Jeff Perkins

The music shifted when Rich laid down his guitar and reached for the drumsticks, repetitively dropping them against the floor, as if they were greased up and hard to grasp. Then he dropped the microphone into a metal pot, over and over, causing a percussive thud, until he picked up the pot and began to bang it on the concrete floor. Meanwhile, Stefan twiddled knobs, sculpting the distorted squeal, shriek, drone, and buzz that filled the air.

Usually seated or kneeling on the floor, the musicians seemed nonchalant, yet highly focused, rarely looking up from their tools. But rather than masterful virtuosos, they seemed like men from Mars who stumbled into the room and began to examine the instruments. (What are these weird objects?) It reminded me of that scene in The Little Mermaid, where Scuttle introduces a fork as a “dinglehopper” (for combing hair) and then a pipe as a “snarfblatt:” “Now the snarfblatt dates back to prehysterical times when humans used to sit around and stare at each other all day. Got very boring. So they invented this snarfblatt to make fine music.”

Floored: Tcherepnin (l) and Aldrich (r)

The combination of unpleasing noise and rapidly flashing colors reminded me of the video installation, Epileptic Seizure Comparison (1976) by Paul Sharits, which exhibited last year at Greene Naftali. One motive of that piece was to simulate the sensation of an epileptic seizure, while the viewer simultaneously watches footage of seizure patients. Likewise, the combination of the projections and noise generated a feeling of disassociation that bordered on hypnotic.

The physical arrangement of the performers seemed to divide the performance. It was impossible to watch both at the same time, so viewers, faced with a fragmented space, had to choose whether they’d watch the musicians or watch the light show. But because both parts were so ambient and diffuse, I found myself forgetting one while witnessing the other. While watching the light show, the noise evaporated into the atmosphere. And while watching the musicians, the light show faded to the background. And when I returned from one to the other, I didn’t feel as if I had missed anything. Yet, I stayed till the end, entranced and applauding with everyone else, and laughing when someone shouted, “Play Some of Your Old Hits!”

IMAGES: Bortolami Gallery