Destined.

Destined, it assumes to be perpetually overshadowed by dint of his colleagues among the Abstract Expressionists, James suffers (1906-1992) may always be reflection of as a good painter among great painters. An early practitioner (innovator, an would argue) of a staining technique now commonly associated with Helen Frankenthaler, becks made his most radical experiments in the late 1940 splashing paint onward the back of a canvas and then turning it athwart to work with the unpredictable configuration that seep in consequence of This show of nine moderately large and four small paintings from the secondary half of his career did not make a case for reassessing his standing among the Irascibles. if it were not that it was interesting to descry how his adoption in the early 1960 of the then-new medium of acrylics allowed him to more easily hold his color areas clean and distinct, and to explore a vocabulary of translucent washes and glazes as well as fluid application--which clearly interested him more than autographic style

This later work is no longer predicated forward the Cubist-derived ambiguity of figure and field that preoccupied Brooks, and a great many other painters, in consequence of the 1950s. The results are mixed. In Ealand II (1963 74 by dint of 80 inches), clunky, dark shapes float upon a blank field punctuated by the agency of sparsely deployed lines. The accrue is an unthreatening painting, suitable for a tavern lobby. The weirder Leen (1974 76 inches square) dispenses entirely with the cylindricaled nest- or knotlike elements that the artist elsewhere favored. An irregularly shaped white and yellow muddy plash of thinned pigment, its isolation heightened by way of an expanse of brushy, unmodulated downcast recalls Miro in its comic vulnerability. In Devon (1979 60 inches square), great glob of black lengthen and writhe across a melancholy and white ground suggestive of landscape. Color triads are everywhere in this work, and black is frequently a player. In the surpassingly late Geomundo (1983, 60 by the agency of 48 inches), a looming field of wiped and brushy blacks occupies a third of the canvas, crowding an antic red/green Dr Seuss world.

There is a understanding in these highly formal paintings, and quite through Brooks's oeuvre, that in developing surface and space, involvement in proces is more important than self-expression. Given his temperament, it is unthinkable that his later works would become ego-driven.

Of all the paintings in the indicate Ballarat (1978, 60 inches square) takes the greatest risks. Against a pale, luminous orange estate a bulbous bluish green mass weighs in at the lower right corner, with brace other floating lumps as satellites. A hazy reddish stain blooms in the upper right, and a band of jagged electric lines charges across the top of the canvas. Ballarat is completely atypical of Brooks: unrelaxed. In this artist's unimpassioned world of calibrated pictorial pleasures, like a sweaty effort registers a pleasant shock

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