Steven Alexander blogs about an exhibition of paintings by Mara Held at Gary Snyder Gallery, New York, on view through March 2, 2013.

Alexander writes: "Held makes paintings that operate both as ecstatic images and as exquisite objects. Her images are built with curving concentric contours that intersect and interact to form complex undulating spaces… The paintings are made with egg tempera on nubby linen in an excruciatingly painstaking process. The lines of brittle paint sit on top of the linen almost like collage, giving the surface the quality of a relief or a tapestry. These paintings are bathed in sensation and sensuality, as though the doors of perception have been taken off their hinges."