Kim Sloane reviews two concurrent exhibitions of work by painter Paul Resika: 8 Paintings from 8 Decades at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects (through February 10) and Eight Recent Paintings at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York (through February 9).

Sloane writes that Resika's "relationship with the world of appearances shifts, sometimes closer, sometimes attenuated past immediate recognition, but he is always in this world of abstraction and language. This is what, I suspect, he looks for in the museums and galleries; how this abstract language, learned with Hoffman, is found in the art of all ages. The effect, or power, of this abstraction, this mastery of the language, is that every part of the painting is elevated to a symbol. Every element lives as both itself, as paint, and as metaphor. The disc can be a vibrant red circle, placed on the picture plane amongst other forms, alive as a participant in the choreography of composition, but it is also seen is also the sign of a setting sun. What is being examined, what Resika has long contemplated, is the nature of abstraction, and conversely, the abstraction of nature. For the artist it is the many ways visual rhymes can be wrought that makes the correspondence."