West Street Gallery is proud to present new works by New York-based artists Julia Rommel, Dan Shaw-Town, and Eric Palgon. In his 1963 thesis statement at Yale, when the artist was producing near-monochromes in grayscale, Brice Marden spoke of secreting his “highly subjective state within Spartan limitation.” The artists here work in a vastly different context, deploying the vocabulary of “strict confines, confines which I have painted myself into and intend to explore with no regrets,” in order to impart some semblance of contemporary “subjectivity.”

Rommel’s work forgoes a single formal or mark-making strategy for practical construction. This can, but does not necessarily, involve folding, wrapping, stretching, covering or filling. The artist takes a mechanical approach to painting—laying down with the goal of covering the surface. Completion, the artist says, results when gesture stands independently, and the painting is discovered as a new and compelling object on the wall.

Shaw-Town applies graphite to paper until the ground is saturated, and transcends two-dimensions. The simple all-over are illusion-less—neither figural nor abstract, to compositions are voids that belie the labor of Shaw-Town’s intensive drawing. This disappearance of the artist finds analogy in Shaw-Town’s use of compositional washes to confuse figure and ground. Here he sets paper atop low platforms and pieces of rubber—the last alludes to the eraser that (re)moves graphite and the protective gloves that isolate object from artist.

In his recent paintings, Palgon uses a wide brush and opposing colors to create swipes of gestural abstraction. The most typical compositional strategy involves a coming forward out of the canvas, or moving shallowly into it, to create foreshortened mobius strips. Gestures break, congregate and even spray at the end of the canvas. They invite and refute sincerity, and subjectivity.