This artist-run Williamsburg gallery inaugurated its program two years ago with a solo show by Pamela Jorden, a young Los Angeles-based adherent of a reemergent gestural abstraction. The five untitled oil-on-linen paintings, all dated 2006, in Jorden’s recent return engagement are structured primarily through the accretion of lots of little, local marks, gathering flicks and flourishes of the brush and palette knife in more or less discrete and often unbroken “tube” colors against a brooding, dark ground. The parsimonious paint handling emphasizes tactility, as if the painter were feeling her way across her surfaces. The interaction of hues functions not to establish the illusion of space so much as to suggest a psychological resonance embodying the opposing impulses of “sunshine and noir,” to borrow Lars Nittve’s phrase describing the L.A. zeitgeist. Read More