Albert Oehlen at New Museum

Albert Oehlen’s paintings are neither beautiful nor seductive. Their self-consciously brutal surfaces seem to be corrupted from within, a perversion of the paintings they might have been. In Descending Hot Rays, Albert Oehlen’s monotone canvas occupies a space between representation and abstraction, his forms and textures converging not to create an illusion, but a suggestion of invention. Traditional painterly expression is infused with a steely reference to technology. Albert Oehlen doesn’t use paint to convey meaning, but rather to explore the possibilities of the medium’s '‘function’'.