James Kalm visits Cary Smith: New Paintings and Drawings at Fredricks & Freiser, New York, on view through November 18, 2017.

Kalm notes: “For decades now, Cary Smith has maintained an austere compositional approach to abstraction, developing themes that he expounds on as if they were Euclidian axioms. Though this might sound dry and overly intellectual, Smith is also a sensitive and playful colorist, and by combining these two impulses, his works can perform a delicate balancing act between the cerebral and the whimsical.”