Contributed by Shirley Irons / In a dream, I asked Alex Kwartler if his work was about the unreliability of images. God no, he yelled. “Off-Peak,” his current show at Magenta Plains, presents modestly scaled paintings that read across the room like music, with beats and rests, highs and lows. Their subjects include tender representation, stark pop, painterly abstraction, tin can lids, dots, drains, and shipwrecks. They echo and repeat. Their consistency lies in his assured, skillful paint handling. When you can do anything with paint, why not just do it?
