ART REVIEW

Reverie and Despair: At first, Emilio Cueto’s stark new paintings at Newspace yield little but texture and tone. Half of them, painted on wood, are smooth and slick, an inky black in the corners dissolving to a smoky puff of gray in the center. The others, painted on canvas, are an all-over pristine ivory, with occasional sanded-down blips and bumps that hint at underlying, contrasting layers of paint.

Uniformly modest in size (22 by 16 inches) and hung in an alternating light/dark pattern, Cueto’s paintings seem at first emotionally tight and sensually stunted by the formal rigors and confines of the monochromatic format.

Gradually, subtle beauties emerge. The atmospheric, diamond-shaped cloud of gray assumes movement and life, finding an echo in the lighter works’ shadowy centers, discernible from a distance. Ultimately, the paintings begin to yield meaning and carry some philosophical weight, especially when regarded in tandem with three of Cueto’s works on paper, displayed separately in the back of the gallery.

Each bears text handwritten in pencil across a pale, foggy ground. In “Black,” the word “ha” repeats itself endlessly in neat rows, like forced laughter filling an uneasy silence.

In “Zero,” a densely transcribed passage by Wittgenstein fades in and out across the page. “A picture,” one line reads, “depicts reality by representing a possibility of existence and nonexistence of states of affairs.” A brief, poetic inscription skips across the paper in syncopated rhythm in the third work: “three days gone as if written on water with a needle.”

Cueto’s preoccupation with the simultaneity of being and nothingness issues powerfully from the works on paper and resonates further in the exquisite purity of the paintings. Atmospheres more than images, the paintings evoke meditational reverie tinged with the artist’s own quiet despair.

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* Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., (213) 469-9353, through Nov. 15.