Ohio-based artist Scott Olson presents his first solo show of diminutive abstract paintings in the downstairs gallery. His fussy curiosities display, at first, an almost comic classicism, hewing close to a third generation academic style. A mishmash of lessons learned and plateaus reached by household names generations ago— Braque’s fractured rigor, Malevich’s mystical approach to Geometric Abstraction, and by a contemporary artist, as with Tomma Abts’ graceful blankets of order.

These and other now iconic approaches to abstraction are recombined and repurposed here, channeled through Olson’s learned mind and capable hand. Frontloading in the library, with dense tracts of theoretical prose from Dada through to the 1970’s French Supports/Surfaces movement, Olson freights his paintings with histories pure and diluted, original and derivative.

Olson’s varied techniques—layering, taping, rubbing, scumbling, obliterating, incising, combing, varnishing—feel like pure painting unburdened by the accomplishments of his predecessors. They appear compositionally satisfying and attractive (like most abstraction leached of its political intent or impact) lovingly generated stand-ins for Painting itself. No matter how laboriously concocted, they are surrogates in the Alan McCollum vein. The paintings are experimental yet mannered—self-conscious in their mindlessness since all the knowing has preceded the first brushstroke.