James Kalm visits the exhibition Gary Stephan at Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, on view through April 26, 2014.

Kalm writes that Stephan's paintings are "constant jaunts into unexpected fields of painterly investigation. With this exhibition of new work, Stephan shows his almost droll sense of compositional design and a uniquely austere color sense." The gallery press release notes: "In Stephan’s canvases familiar paint and palette handling along with figure and ground relationships are inverted. He privileges shadows, outlines, parts that make up wholes. Displacements are commonplace in these works. He uses vacillation as a subject, creating punctures in the canvas that provide progressive openings from background to foreground. Some works originate in landscape, others in architecture and some are informed by the making and unmaking of the work itself as different types of space and perspectives come into view."