Stephen Maine reviews Ryan Crotty: Never the Less at High Noon Gallery, New York, on view through February 4, 2018.

Maine writes: “To the extent that Crotty’s work is about the fluid movement of color across the surface, it can be viewed in terms of Color Field painters such as Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler — whom Clement Greenberg championed in the 1960s — and of optical effects that are unabashedly “medium specific,” to use that critic’s phrase. It’s always satisfying to see a roundly reviled idiom reanimated by a visual intelligence keen enough to recognize that there’s more work to be done, and fearless enough to press ahead with it.”