DOWNTOWN

Charles Christopher Hill emerged during the early 1970s with mixed-media works of stitched together newsprint, muslin or cheesecloth. These compositions were buried in the ground, so that after “restoration” they resembled unearthed relics. Since then the artist has dabbled in paint and introduced a trademark vocabulary of crosses, X-shapes, fragmented checkerboards and grid patterns alluding to mathematical systems, patchwork quilts and modernist formalism.

Hill’s latest paper works continue this evolution, counterpointing the repetitive “X” with torn surfaces and zigzag stitching, as well as fragments of Chinese calligraphy. Hill sees the paper’s surfaces as direct allusions to painting. Folds and wrinkles simulate heavy impasto, stains do for broad brush strokes, stitching as delicate, finely etched lines. Results are a form of mummified painting. Outward characteristics of the medium are still visible, but its essence is long dead and buried.

This has the makings of an interesting conceptual statement about painting’s defensive posture in an age of appropriation, but also about its “deification” as an artifact of a purer, perhaps more “spiritual” era. Unfortunately, Hill envelopes his thesis in a system of signs that has become a formula, as if the increasingly redundant language of Post-Modernism were itself ripe for interment. Maybe that’s the whole point. (Cirrus Gallery, 542 S. Alameda St., to March 7.)--C.G.