In between a late dim sum lunch in Chinatown and an early evening jazz concert uptown, I managed to squeeze in a quick visit to Chelsea on Saturday afternoon. I had a list of about eight shows I wanted to visit and several of them are worth mentioning.

At Gagosian gallery through October 25 is the latest show of paintings by Cecily Brown. Ranging in size from intimate to immense, Brown’s brushy, expressive abstractions invite close examination as well as distant appraisal. In some of the smaller works (perhaps 30″x30″ or smaller), squiggles of pinks, oranges, and red look like explosions of flesh. Many of the larger pieces (as large as 8′x12′) have more earthy tones and read like landscapes. As you allow your eye to wander around the composition, you start to perceive representational elements such as faces popping up between brushstrokes and even large, foreshortened figures that at first are hidden from consciousness. Some of these larger works reminded me of the most vigorous Joan Mitchell paintings, though Brown’s compositions are more “all-over” and incorporate elements of representation not found in Mitchell’s work. The Gagosian web site includes a nice (though slightly dizzying) video that provides a good sense of the work and its installation in the gallery.

At McKenzie Fine Art, Chris Gallagher exhibits about a dozen optically charged paintings consisting of finely brushed, often curved stripes of color. Many of the paintings look like close-ups of long exposure photographs of swirling planets. In some, the careful use of color and color transitions produces an optical depth to the work that pleases the eye. In others, the color choices provide for dramatic complementary contrasts which cause the paintings appear to vibrate (I had to check to see if the flickering I was perceiving was due to a faulty light bulb, but as far as I can tell the effect is purely optical illusion).

I wrote in September that I like my conceptual art to have a strong visual component and Vic Muniz delivered with his show, “Verso”, at Sikkema Jenkins (through Oct 11). Leaning against the gallery walls are nine “paintings” whose “fronts” are facing the wall. The viewer is left to examine the “backs” of these works and upon close inspection one finds labels, gallery stickers, and other signs of painting provenance. One reads, “Starry Night”; another, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”; and so on.  The artist has worked closely with museum curators (and with art forgers!) to fabricate these “trompe-l’oeils” (as the gallery literature describes them) of the actual backs of these and other famous paintings, right down to the nicks in the frames, the stains on the canvases, and the type of hanging hardware. You might think, “Why would I want to look at the back of these paintings?” but the effect is delicious. The desire to peek around to the “front” of these works to see what’s there is strong, but all you can do is look at the “backs”. And as you move from famous painting to famous painting, it’s fascinating to see what the backs of these works look like. You’ve seen Starry Night a million times, but probably have never seen its backside– how interesting to see the accumulation of museum stickers as well as the framing hardware!

I happened into ACA Galleries on 20th Street and saw a gorgeous show of representational work by Joseph Peller (through Oct 21). In the exhibition “Surviving the Darkness: Urban Fragments”, Peller paints pictures of isolation in the form of cityscapes, portraits, and urban interiors. The paintings are the kind you want to look at carefully to examine the brushstrokes, to enjoy the color transitions and use of warm and cool tones, and to think about the process the artist went through in making the painting.

Finally (about as far away from Cecily Brown as you can get), if you like the surface fetish California minimalism of John McCracken, you’ll enjoy his show in one of the David Zwirner galleries on 19th Street. Instead of his usual “planks”, this exhibition features narrower “beams” of highly polished, highly saturated color. If his previous works were like the white keys on the piano, these are shaped more like the black keys. The beams lean against the walls in groups, reinforcing this piano-key effect. The “sculptures” show well in the humongous gallery space, where the natural cool sky light coming from the ceiling reflects off the shiny objects to provide some contrast in color temperature, making the pieces less monolithic. The press releas goes a little overboard (“the works simultaneously refer to nothing and possibly everything”), but if you like your minimalism colorful, this makes for an engaging final stop in Chelsea.

I’ve started playing around with creating digital art, both static as well as animated.  Here’s one of my first “experiments”.  Click on the image to start the display.