Patience Pays: Although Marie Rafalko earned her...

Patience Pays: Although Marie Rafalko earned her master’s degree in 1990, she has not had a solo show since she was a student. At Newspace Gallery, her modestly scaled abstractions reveal that the young painter has not been wasting her time. Resolved, sophisticated and mature, her subtle paintings embody an edgy, contemporary flair.

Each of Rafalko’s rectangular or oval canvases appears to be a dense slab of synthetic color that responds to every movement of one’s eyes. The gradated fields of sea-green, deep burgundy and matte olive that make up these paintings have a meaty, quasi-sculptural presence, suggesting that the colors don’t merely cover the surfaces but run all the way through.

Rafalko engineers this effect by stretching canvas over solid wood panels and then obliterating the weave of the fabric with layer upon layer of finely sanded gesso. The super-smooth texture that results resembles handmade porcelain, not quite as perfect or fragile as the fine clay in the hands of a master ceramist but marked by a similar delicacy.

Likewise, the paint Rafalko pours over her carefully prepared grounds contains a pair of complementary yet dissonant pigments. Each hand-mixed batch consists of one warm, earthy color that is organic and comforting and a hot Day-Glo tone that is as artificial as it is disquieting.

Rafalko often lays out her paintings so that a neon halo faintly glows around a dense field of shifting darkness. Her best works move through time as well as tint, compressing the passage from dusk to night or from dawn to day into two dimensions. Quietly exciting, these patient paintings suggest that life is so full of meaningful details that you have to live in slow-motion to notice them.

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* Newspace Gallery, 5241 Melrose Ave., (213) 469-9353, through Feb. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.