William Eckhardt Kohler reviews four current and recent exhibitions in New York: Eleanor Ray at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects (through April 20), Daniel Rios Rodriguez: Crosseyed and Painless at Sargent's Daughters, Patrick Keesey: Partial Recovery at Blackston Gallery, and Pius Fox: We Expected Something Better Than Before at Pablo's Birthday (through May 4).

Kohler writes that Ray's work "appears to spring from the simple pleasure of seeing and painting the rhythms and patterns that she finds in the world around her… [Rodriguez's] tone is a kind of comic grief. The subject; skulls, lemons, weedy grass, an old tennis shoe, speak to small moments of pain, loss and inevitable entropy, but with a sense of humor… [Keesey's works] "reflect a process that while initiated by observation of nature are more about the feel of the act seeing rather than a description of what is seen… [and Fox] usually lands on the abstract side of identifiable reference, though it is clear, that like Keesey, he is taking his visual cues from the world around him, in this instance the studio; windows, books and leaning paintings among the more frequent starting points."