ART REVIEW : John Zinsser Repays Debt to Andy Warhol

John Zinsser’s snappy abstractions have an immediate appeal that rarely wears thin. This is important because they’re thin to begin with--which isn’t to say that his two- and three-color paintings lack substance, content or depth. It’s to insist that pictorial meaning resides in razor-thin slices of space, or on nothing other than the picture plane.

Zinsser builds his jumpy, punchy paintings by overlaying bold monochromatic fields with wide swathes of synthetic colors applied with squeegees, spatulas and spackling knives. Speed, more than personal expression or formal composition, determines the structure and significance of these square and vertical works.

The eight works at Thomas Solomon’s Garage seem not to have been made by machines nor crafted by hand. Instead, they hover in a strange space between mechanical reproduction and sincere gesture, toying with our ability to distinguish one from the other. A few flirt with bare hints of illusionistic space, but most emphasize dumb materiality, such as oil’s capacity to form rippled ridges, clotted blobs and translucent skins.

The strength of Zinsser’s art lies in its refusal to believe that mediated sensations are a diminished version of authentic or original experiences. His scrutiny of paint’s physical properties isn’t meant to deliver transcendence, as promised by Modernist purity.

Unlike an earlier generation of process painters, he attempts to take photographic reproduction into account. Warhol’s serial, silk-screened images are powerful precedents for the 32-year-old New Yorker. Zinsser’s paintings give substance to the “frozen moment” of stop-action photography, as if their seemingly self-propelled bands of color had been instantly arrested and timelessly suspended.

Pop abstractions, his paintings repay their debt to Warhol by compelling us to see the father of Pop as a painter--primarily as a brilliant colorist. Originality isn’t always about doing something that’s never been done before; sometimes, it just requires seeing clearly what’s already there.

* Thomas Solomon’s Garage, 928 N. Fairfax Ave., (213) 654-4731, through June 20. Closed Mondays.