John Yau reviews Allison Miller: Speeds at Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, on view through January 30, 2016.

Yau writes: "Miller’s process isn’t to cover the canvas with paint so much as to cover and uncover it, to interrupt, upend or subvert an expectation. For her, a canvas isn’t a surface to which another uniform surface is applied, but a kind of diary where things are added, covered over, uncovered – a combination of construction and archaeology. To assemble her paintings, she has transformed aspects of trompe l’oeil, hard-edged abstraction (the use of masking tape), patterning and repetition, transparency and layering, as ways of assembling her paintings. She also seems to have gotten something from the French affichiste artist Jacques Villeglé’s use of torn posters in his decollage. All these possible sources are subsumed into the painting; there is no citation, irony or nostalgia, only the present tense of the painting… "