Tim Keane reviews Jake Berthot: in Color at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, on view through April 23, 2016.

Keane writes: "We could call these works action paintings for prolonged meditation. For Berthot, like the poet Wallace Stevens, planes of aesthetic knowledge — such as origination, composition, cohesion, rumination — should be art’s primary subjects, with the artwork serving as experience. And though these aesthetic dimensions of knowledge are distinct, in Berthot’s work they often overlap… Berthot’s paintings are confident diagrams that map shifting relationships between our seemingly limitless human capacity for reinvention and the finite properties of the natural world."