Assembly 3: Assembly, Monticello, New York

Founder Bosco Sodi selected the artists for the two focus gallery installations, Johnny Abrahams and Davide Balliano, to combat the widespread flattening objectification of art. Which it turns out is, paradoxically, most damaging to painting. Despite seeming like a pretty unalloyed good in support of artist awareness and brand-building, Instagram and the like, with their don’t bother being there ethos—when layered on top of the necessary practical evils of websites, PDF portfolios, and online viewing rooms—are in fact killing art as an empirical enterprise. The danger is that all art is reduced to graphic design, with painters pumping out the equivalent of rasterizable logos.

Abrahams’ and Balliano’s meticulous paintings generate energy through the compressed application of a deliberately limited range of exacting gestures. To say that there is little new in them—with their clear antecedents in the period from the end of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1950s through the triumph of Minimalism in the 1970s—would be as foolish as saying that there is nothing new to be found in a folksong or a prayer. It is the indivisible things that yield the most through repetition. A line, and its divergence from another: any deviation from a mean. The centering thing—the thing that Bosco wants to elevate through Assembly—is the quality we associate with craft, the fine line of human care that separates a canvas with paint on it from a mirror for the soul.