Wolf Kahn found a highly personal way to move beyond Abstract Expressionism, in the 1950s the reigning art-ideology, to a newer style exploring “figure” and “representation”—predominantly landscape.

where color either becomes too sweet or it becomes too harsh, it becomes too noisy or too quiet, and at that point I still want the picture to be strong, forceful, and the carrier of everything that a painting has to have: contrast, drama, austerity.

And to mark the areas clearly, of course, that works against it. So, that’s one of the things that I try to overcome, the idea of having very clearly marked and designated color areas or drawing areas.

You just keep on worrying about the picture until it tells you what it wants to be. That’s the Abstract Expressionist point of view. I am a formalist artist. That means that you are primarily interested in structure rather than in description. That’s me, being a formalist, but at the same time, I like to draw. I do like to describe. I’m constantly fighting against taking that too far.

I’m a non-naturalist landscape painter. I just think that landscape is a tradition that’s always going to be around. Nobody can make it go away.

Some works center on a single hue; these include Yellow Square, 2018, in which vivid tonalities, both joyful and jolting, recall the artist’s observation that ‘yellow is the color of buttercups – and of warning signals.’ Others employ piquant pairings, like the electric oranges and blue-violets of Blue Stage, Orange Wings…to dazzle and challenge the eye. Dancing over and across these radiant hues, Kahn’s ‘scribble-scrabble’ sets his canvases into flickering motion. These extemporaneous marks upend the secure, relatively traditional compositions and burnished surfaces of the artists earlier paintings in favor of overall texture, at times impeding the legibility of the landscape. As critic Karen Wilkin observed, ‘We feel as if we are seeing through a wealth of unstable pictorial incidents, rather than, as in traditional landscapes, seeing into the picture.

rewarding the focused, inquisitive looking that today’s frenzied ‘attention economy’ has made so rare. In a time when the traditional narrative of modern art as a progression of ‘isms’ is collapsing, and artists are finding unimagined life in what was presumed outmoded, Kahn’s paintings invite rediscovery. In turn, they will let us see the world anew.

– intimate pastels have always been an important part of the artist’s oeuvre – his new large canvases explore a shifting territory located somewhere between the familiar and the imagined, between the specific and the dream-like, even between the scrupulously observed and the abstract. Part of the fascination of Kahn’s strongest pictures, a category to which his new large landscapes must be assigned, is this very doubleness. No matter how simplified, his imagery is elemental and usually easy to grasp; houses and barns are presented as unequivocally legible profiles, while the fundamental relationships of landscape space – the way, for example, the ground plane supports masses of vegetations and trees – almost always seem rational. We can always readily understand Kahn’s images in terms of our experience of the real world. That, and the sheer gorgeousness of his color, are no small part of their appeal. What distinguishes his most compelling works is that there is nothing literal in the ways in which he suggests his motifs.

we can feel that we receive only intimations of his nominal subject, rather than being given an opportunity to study it. It’s as if the unreliability of perception itself or the passage of time were as much the theme of the painting as the motif that presumably generated it.

whether they are works on canvas or on paper, the more we are made aware that he conjures up all of his comforting associations not by depiction, whether accurate or approximate, but by essentially abstract means. Far more than they are images of the known, Kahn’s pictures are non-specific constructions of wholly artificial, albeit evocative color.

to an idea of landscape that is tranquil, reflective, and (as his titles tell us) witty. He scans what is before him for patterns, for broad and sometimes astonishing contrasts. He brings back from his survey of nature colors – magentas, purples, orange-pinks – that must be seen to be believed. We do believe them; his images keep a sense of place and moment, though what strikes us first is their abstract gorgeousness. Gorgeous, but they do not leave the earth.

Regarding them instead as inventions, he often has described his work as a springboard for exploring the fundamentals of painting, and, more broadly, how we perceive the world.