The two painters whose work currently hangs at Corey Daniels Gallery in Wells – “Deborah Zlotsky, New Works/Tom Gaines, the Last Paintings” (through July 22) – are, technically speaking I suppose, abstract artists. But both flirt if not explicitly or even obviously with figuration.

Tom Gaines probably lingers closest to that dividing line. Gaines, who died in February at the age of 88, split his time between New Jersey and a summer studio here, in Belfast. The works hanging in this show were his final output and represent a culmination of his inexorable journey toward pure abstraction. Dominating “Rock: 235 Warrior,” which Daniels believes to be the point at which he laid down his brushes for good, is a square black void levitating above a horizon line, a prescient expression of what he likely intuited was near at hand.

Gaines’s early career focused on interiors and still life paintings. But gradually he began stripping away content, believing it to be a confining encumbrance. As he pared back, and then further back still, he developed a style obliquely reminiscent of various artists whose work he must have encountered in New York and its environs. We can see in Gaines’s subtle nods to, among other things, the radiant floating color masses of Rothko; the blurry-edged cloud-like shapes of Adolph Gottlieb; and the blocky rounded-corner forms and textural paint treatments of Philip Guston’s late 1950s to early ’60s abstractions.

But Gaines’s later work, inspired by coastal boulders and ocean vistas of Penobscot Bay that he found in Maine, became a mainstay. All the works in this show, and for years prior to it, have “Rock” titles, followed by a number and another word. Eventually he said that he worked with rock forms in his head, rather than from direct observation in nature. But they became his signature.

In his studio one day, while trying to use solvents to wipe off a color he had applied some days before, he discovered a textural quality that implied what he called a kind of “erosion.” This irrevocably transformed his painting process, which he refined over years with other methods, sometimes employing abrasive pads and electric buffers. “In this way,” he explained in 2014 to Maine Home + Design magazine, “any firm edge will become more organic and alive, and sometimes ghosts of former shapes will remain.”

This earthy, organic quality imbues his “rocks” with an animist spirit. They are not static, dead objects, but emotive living organisms. You can almost feel that life vibrating inside their softly defined contours. There are three of these forms stacked one on top of the other in “Rock: 222 Butterflies,” yet, indicative of its title, the top one has lifted off and taken flight, while the next one down, teetering unsteadily on the bottom rock, seems on the verge of doing the same.

There is also a sense of time elapsing in various paintings, particularly those like “Rock: 221 Sleeping Dogs” and “Rock: 231 Fortress.” In “Sleeping Dogs” we literally see a painting on top of a painting. Gaines chose not to completely obliterate the original iteration, leaving a ghost of it behind the newer foreground shapes. There is also a yellow-red form (or pair of forms) hovering behind the boxy foreground shapes in “Fortress,” though we can’t be as certain that this comes from a previous intention or was conceived as part of the composition. Either way, however, the sense of layering of forms and colors in all the works (the colors partially scraped off to reveal other colors underneath) suggests processes that have evolved over time.

In every painting, too, we discern a horizon line that implies firmament and a “beyond” that can be taken as sea and/or sky or, in a more expansive conceptual way, dimensions beyond our physical reality. The results are at once beautiful, palpably tactile, mournful and transcendent.

Zlotsky’s work is more distinctly abstract. Unless, of course, we understand them to be records of movement and currents of flow. Her well-known series “Diaspora” was about just that: the migrations of masses of people, whether the source was the wanderings of her own Jewish people, or any number of nomadic mass migrations arising out of displacements due to war, famine, natural disaster and other kinds of strife.

Earlier paintings explored the colors, patterns and diaphanous movements of vintage 1960s and ’70s scarves. Always, however, a sense of movement and a temporality of things are present. Like Gaines, her paint application is highly tactile. Yet it feels more sensual so due to its undiluted profusion, luscious color, curving trajectories and conveyance of fluid motion. Unlike Gaines, her edges are clearly defined for the most part. We can almost feel paint flowing in parallel winding and swooping channels of color.

These channels often oscillate from forefront to background to forefront again, deliberately confusing our perspective and the sense of continuous flow on a single plane. Further perceptual interruptions occur in the form of drips and smears of paint, which appear more superficial, the effect being one of making all the movement seem as though it’s transpiring at a distance from the surface of the canvases.

“Double Take” goes even further in confounding our perception of what is front and what is back by using a thin red line, similar to the outline of a box shape, superimposed on the color forms. As the eye follows the line, it’s impossible to say whether it is moving toward the color or away from it.

Occasionally a brief drag of her brush in a contrasting color emphasizes the sense of rounding a curve along the flow, but can also make that flow recede into the depths of the canvas or bulge forward. There is a constant push-pull of color, a concept central to the work of Hans Hofmann. Though her geometry is distinct, her lines clean and clear, Zlotsky is unlike other geometric abstract painters in that her color is laid down with more painterly flourish.

This painterliness creates a modulation of color within the borders of each channel of movement, imparting an ephemerality or instability of color that wavers from flat to transparent. This modulation mitigates what could have felt more like cheery Pop Art graphics and adds, instead, a sensation of the works morphing before us in time and space.

The more and more we contemplate Zlotsky’s work, the more we realize how complexly they are composed, and we begin asking a host of questions: Why does that blue stop here and continue there? Why does one side of that square seem to collapse into the canvas while the other side advances toward us? If you let go into them, they become wondrous, dizzying journeys through various dimensions.

Typical of Daniels, everything is not neatly confined in one place. So, remember to wander upstairs to see more of Gaines’s earlier work, and into the front gallery to see Zlotsky’s charcoal works on paper, which reveal how much function the color in her canvases serve in disorienting our sense of perspective.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

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