Andy Battaglia profiles painter Adrian Ghenie whose recent paintings are on view at Pace Gallery, New York through February 18, 2017.

Battaglia notes: “Compositions can be figurative, [Ghenie] said, but the power of painting—when it has any power at all—is less in the cause than in the effect. And that effect is abstract regardless of the elements that went into creating a picture or considering it after the fact. ‘People imagine that abstraction is some kind of gesture,’ Ghenie said of those who approach abstraction as a rhetorical stance. ‘But when you try to paint a tree, you realize, “I cannot paint all the leaves, I cannot paint all the textures.” So you have to invent a movement of the brush that would suggest, in your mind, a tree. That is, essentially, abstract.'”