Caleb De Jong reviews an exhibition of paintings by Jason Karolak at McKenzie Fine Art Inc., New York, on view through March 17, 2013.

De Jong writes: "Space is a metaphor for our lived environment in Jason Karolak’s first solo exhibition at Lower East Side’s McKenzie Fine Art Inc. Pictorial distance is defined by Karolak with two consistent but divergent painting sizes, one large and spatially expansive and the other minute and pictorially flat. While Karolak’s language lives and moves from the dictates of form, color, and line, a language that would seem to imply flatness, the paintings offer a richly detailed representation of pictorial dimension and tactile experience. For Karolak, space, either deeply horizontal or directly planar, is a formal stand in for the recessive or progressive elements of the viewer’s perception of the natural world."