William Corwin reviews two recent exhibitions: Amalia Piccinini: Exile at Art 101 and Stephen Maine: Halftone Paintings at 490 Atlantic Gallery.

Corwin begins: "Surface and the illusion of surface are the heart of the matter in the work of two abstract painters whose recent exhibitions in Brooklyn dangle the mystery of process and the indisputable facticity of material before the viewer. Stephen Maine’s paintings utilize a Luddite methodology that mimics and critiques the patterns of higher-tech dot printing processes while Amalia Piccinini coats her canvases in skeins of dark stains with accretions of paint, forming a self-consciously imperfect and mottled texture. Both artists circumvent typical questions of composition, instead conceptualizing painting as coating, skin or happy coincidence: within these alternative parameters though, they generate a considered reappraisal of recognized tropes."