The New York Times: Galleries

WILL HEINRICH
September 19, 2024

Sometime in the late 1960s, Jeff Way sprinkled pure acrylic pigment over a primed canvas and made a grid pattern with a chalk line. When he was satisfied, he fixed everything into place by spraying on medium. In one early example of the series, which he calls “eccentric squares,” the red lines are crisp and closely set, so that despite the blue and yellow notes and the rust-colored fog that envelops the whole, the piece bears a clear relationship to the Cartesian serenity of 1960s minimalism.

Soon, though, Way turned up the tension with louder colors and a more widely spaced grid that left room for discrete, Rorschach-like clouds of pigment in every cell. A few times he emphasized the gritty, unresolved texture of his process by working in white on white. Sometimes the pigment seems to float and disappear; occasionally he cast down colors so thickly that the grid was hardly visible.

More recently Way has been painting grids with a brush or drawing them with colored pencils. “Jeff Way: Then & Now (1970-2024),” down the block from his longtime TriBeCa studio at Storage Gallery, includes a number of bright, plaid-like drawings and paintings just as electric as the older work. Way goes over and over every surface until the tiny bits of white left exposed are practically shooting out into the gallery.