Paul Behnke photo blogs a visit to the exhibition The Indexical Mark at Life on Mars Gallery, Bushwick, Brooklyn, on view through April 6, 2014. The show features works by Karin Davie, Ben LaRocco, Joel Longenecker, Mike Olin, Fran O’Neill, Ben Pritchard, Susan Rothenberg, Karen Schwartz, Whitney Wood-Bailey, and Etty Yaniv.

Michael David, in his curatorial statement, notes that the "essence of the practice of painting, what is essential and most uniquely specific to that medium, is painting’s ability to leave a record of material transformation (via the immediacy of hand) to create a recorded act that is immediate, while it at once expands and compresses time sequences, revealing the depth of an endless pictorial space.No other medium can do this. Whether it is in the push and pull of the incredible fat paint/color vibrations of Hans Hoffman, with his constant reversal of positive and negative spaces, or the sublime, infinite transparencies found in Vermeer that build forms out of light and an angel's touch, it’s the paint – the essence, the schmaltz of paint that creates both a physical record and an illusionistic space."