John Yau reviews the exhibition Paul Feeley: 1957 -1962 at Garth Greenan Gallery, New York, on view through October 12, 2013.

Yau writes: "By shifting the focus to 1957–’62 — the latter being the year that Feeley began making the emblematic abstractions that seemed to have secured his reputation — we learn that the oeuvre contains a wider range of works than we might have previously thought. These are just a few of the things that struck me about work in the exhibition: Feeley was intensely interested in a confounded figure-ground relationship; he was able to economically synthesize the formal and the comic; he was attentive to the erotic; his work clearly stands apart from Color Field painting."