Murray Dessner paintings capture the sky's shimmer

Murray Dessner's latest show, of 22 acrylic paintings on canvas and one work on paper at the Rosenfeld Gallery, has brought full circle his long preoccupation with color. Featuring both brilliant and pale hues and few deep tones, some of these abstractions by the prominent Philadelphia artist are canvases of monumental scale, in which the ultimate triumph belongs to color. Gradations of warm and cool, or simply of warmth, are prominent; lately Dessner seems to have achieved a subtle reworking of his formal vocabulary, rather than a quick fix of the color palette he employs.

Dessner - a graduate of the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts who has taught at his alma mater for four decades - draws inspiration from a variety of sources, none more important than the sky itself. It is his main subject in this exhibition, and he captures its cloudy shimmer and glowing, flickering light as seen around the clock.

Other inspirations include frequent summertime trips to Italy and Greece, and the phenomenon of nature itself. And because his canvases don't follow an elaborate mathematical system or color theory, they are quite personal, tapping into recollections and other links - suggested sometimes by the picture titles, which often tell time of day. These paintings invite the uninterrupted flow of perception, so that looking at them intensely finally becomes its own purpose. Several of the canvases are first-rate, Marais among them, and the show as a whole seems to me the strongest by Dessner I've ever seen.

Threesome