Holly Coulis’s exhibition “Table Studies” at Klaus von Nichtssagend function like tightropes or trick devices. These lines bisecting the canvas, where the horizon would fall in a traditional landscape painting, are sometimes table tops or mirroring surfaces in which objects placed bottom-to-bottom reflect one other. Sometimes they seem to indicate a waterline in which vessels are immersed.

Ms. Coulis’s paintbrush produces other tricks. Although the canvases are composed of layers of flat color, the barely defined subjects — food, domestic animals, teapots and other containers — are outlined with two or three veins of contrasting color that create a glowing effect, like neon tubes. You see this particularly in “Cat and Potato Chips” (2017), in which the different-colored outlines amplify the spooky presence of a black cat and the banal (toxic?) food. In “Hot Dog Sun” (2017), sausage links fanning out from a yellow half-circle serve as rays of light, while elsewhere overlapping forms are colored in disparate hues to suggest transparency, refraction or multiple points of view. Read More