Although abstract, these are also paintings with a strong referential pull, they are of New York now. The intricate nesting of shapes and landmarks is recognizable to every inhabitant as shared visual terrain: water towers and bridges, cars, pigeons, toothy gape-mouthed fish for sale on Chinatown sidewalks, hydrants, bicycles (including his own — a reworked Japanese ten-speed outfitted with hi-rise handlebars bought in Spanish Harlem). The paintings are incredibly enjoyable to stare into, as both collectors and gallery visitors have noted, for their friendliness and their changeability, the assembling and reassembling of forms that seems to take place as you look.
     True to the city’s topography and feel, they also provide multiple perspectives — the consuming close-up intensity of Gold (2010) is installed next to an open-space painting, Obelisk Dream (2010), in which the city seems to float, anchored by a Converse sneaker. There are cityscapes as seen from above (the sun, when it appears, burning a clear space in the sky), or from the sidewalk, as in the vertiginous ground-up vantage point of Mountain City (2010).
     But it is in watching the repetition of imagery across multiple canvases that you begin to understand something very vital about human consciousness, about the way we compulsively re-trace ground, both physically and mentally, until these same places, the images and objects, memories, people, and gestures, begin to take on an iconic and sacred status. They create a personalized home for us inside a shared world, and it is the revisiting of them that we find reassuring — that confirms we belong.