Installation view: Sacred Geometry, Peninsula, New York, 2025. Courtesy the artists and Peninsula. Photo: Yanmei Jiang.
With the exception of Kley’s miniature monochromatic ziggurats and amphoras, the “transcendent concepts” at hand primarily concern the necessary conditions for painting. In Kley’s case, however, both her ceramics (which resemble miniature temples and vases) and the snaking patterns that decorate them indicate the artist’s interest in ornamentation that facilitates the viewer’s phenomenologicaltranscendence. In Mountains with Trees (2020), two miniature pyramids are striated in coarse black-and-white foliate designs. Arch (2020) plots filiform patterns along the eponymous charcoal-faced bow’s crescent haunch; the outer curves repeat a two-tone checkered lattice, the black-and-white template reminiscent of the early twentieth-century textiles designed by Josef Hoffmann of the Wiener Werkstätte. Kley includes an ovate motif on each of her sculptures, conforming it to the edges of the form, contracting and distending the almond-shaped figure into bisected quadrilaterals or smoothed flexions.
The chalked patterns adorning Kley’s ceremonial architectural models like hieroglyphs suggest a mythic and esoteric reverie. Triangles with Buds (2021) is Kley’s strongest work in this regard, striking at the core of her devotional theme: the triangular prisms, painted in inverse palettes, are inlaid with unfamiliar, though suggestive, torch-like aliform arrangements flanked by urn-shaped structures. Where Mountains with Trees’s ornamentation is comparatively definite, its titular fronds readily recognizable as leaves, Triangles with Buds traffics in more ambiguous motifs that convey a fair degree of ambiguity. The two composite vessels that make up Triangles with Buds are also fairly weathered, suggesting use-value—perhaps ritualistic. Observing the ceramic object’s rolling grille constellation, one is impressed by the sense that this is a ceremonial instrument marked by symbols that have a particular meaning, however impenetrable they might seem.
Artist-cum-curator Robert Storr’s geometrical abstractions are particularly interesting works that attest to his claim in his 2000 essay “Typologies and Twists” that “Modernism has not concluded with the onset of postmodernism.” Storr’s paintings, all untitled and all executed in 2025, are demonstrative of his conviction that modernism remains a historically incomplete (and perhaps incompletable) endeavor. Storr’s series include two plank-shaped rectangular panels and three squares. Both sets deploy hard-edge geometric blocks painted with a smooth, even facture. Storr successfully uses tonal contrast, a cobalt zagging strip ribboning against a salmon-peach background partitioned by a slate wedge. Each element is punctuated with alabaster squares. Storr’s painterly division of the canvas amounts to a pixel-like reduction as he fills in each component with square fragments that block up into rectangle bricks or amplify into L- and T-shaped tetrominoes. In Storr’s case, the operative “transcendental concept” is part and parcel with a particular rendering of the modernist project, where that which is painted on the picture plane attends to both the virtual flatness of the canvas and the quadrilateral structure of the support.
In his 1993 commentary on Robert Ryman, Storr argued that the painter’s white squares inaugurated “untested painterly possibilities,” suggesting a developmental history for abstract art—one whose orientational narrative hews toward a method rather than a discoverable essence. The method here is that of subtraction from mimesis, including gestural mimesis via the brushstroke, which necessarily represents the empirical world by archiving motion. Unlike Ryman, Storr does not work in a particularly painterly mode. One finds no indication of the hand or arm’s movement here, as Storr’s flat canvases are bereft of spilled or thrown paint. Storr’s late paintings, structured by the subtractive method, dissolve the picture plane into flush square-unit pixels that reflexively confront the shape of the canvas. Storr’s tessellations, which fractionate the canvas into burgundy, slate, and cream-toned blocks, are segmented in configurations that defy any direct worldly homology. Where Piet Mondrian’s evenly networked grid patterns suggest a luminescent metropolis, Storr’s errant square parcels disallow such empirical likeness. Storr’s hard-edge horizontal segments fill, divide, and break space without producing any particular pattern. Consequently, the virtual, or “transcendental” concept conditioning Storr’s modernist approach is of a piece with painting’s inherent inability to achieve absolute mimesis.
Tamara Gonzales’s four paintings appear, at first pass, to be something of an outlier, as they make reference to the markedly figurative tradition of trompe-l’oeil painting. Specifically, they appropriate a visual trick popularized by the seventeenth-century Flemish painter Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts. Gijsbrechts rendered illusionistic space by painting illusive parerga, “incidental” or “subordinate” ornaments that Kant identifies in the Critique of the Power of Judgment’s (1790) Analytic of the Beautiful with the “borders of paintings, draperies on statues, or colonnades around magnificent buildings” that amplify, rather than merely decorate, the artwork’s spatial form. In Gijsbrechts’s case, the added parerga not only include a depicted decorative frame but fraying canvas tatters or lacerations revealing the wooden support. In Gijsbrechts’s The Reverse of a Framed Painting (1670), for instance, a small piece of paper with the number “36” enlivens the depicted verso, enlarging the form towards the painting’s bare borders.
Gonzales appropriates Gijsbrechts’s parerga device, painting motley frames that outline varicolored painting panels and rectangular color fields. In Obsidian Mirror(2023), the pictorial space is an unevenly dusted black oblong. In Gonzales’s three other works on view, it includes pentimenti skulls, embossed diamond-shaped imprints, and under-painted azure lozenges. The embellished frames’ uneven undulations recall Florine Stettheimer’s fancifully looping curlicue and scalloped-edge frames. In each instance, Gonzales’s frames do not enjoy a three-dimensional likeness. Their unevenness and flat outline, clearly intentional, dissolves the trompe-l’oeil trick of the parerga into a geometrical pattern. One wonders, however, if Gonzales sees the framing device as an inherent condition for painting—i.e., as a “transcendental” concept—or if, like Storr’s rectangular blocks, this is but an indirect means to acknowledge the structure of the support. If it is the latter that Gonzales is concerned with, Obsidian Mirror is the most accomplished work, as the rectangular plane is filled by empty blackness, the hollow magnitude aptly picturing that which preconditions painterly possibility.
Sacred Geometry is an exhibition well worth attending. It consists of three artists channeling the modernist project through geometric abstraction, without, as Gonzales puts it in a 2017 interview with Raymond Foye and Peter Lamborn Wilson, “making art about the previous art.”