Upon entering Operating System, now on view at PFA Gallery in the District, one can’t avoid being immediately struck by the vibratory quality that activates the space as a whole. The exhibition features artists Jeremy Flick, Paola Oxoa, Alex Puz, and Michael Scott, each presenting abstract work rooted in a self-designed, carefully systematized pictorial logic. While the resulting works unsurprisingly vary widely in appearance, the artists all creatively explore tensions between rigorously limited formal languages and inevitable human idiosyncrasies. Indeed, it is such friction—the type perspicuously concealed by the seamless feedback loops and algorithms that shape so much of daily life—that ultimately enlivens the systems at hand.
An Alex Puz painting, one of the show’s most compelling works, sets the tone. Hung near the gallery’s entrance, at first glance, Oppositional Glow’s (2025) curving lines of finely gradated, complementary purples and yellows flicker before our eyes in a way that recalls the experiments with optical perception undertaken by Op artists in the 1960s. Closer, sustained looking, however, widens the work’s sensory reach. The dense materiality of its layered constituent lines becomes palpable, and subtle variations in paint handling point towards the persistence of a hand—and corresponding maker—behind the optical complexities. This sense is intensified by how the canvas’s central vertical register reads almost like a structural spine: it not only hints at a potential stabilization of the work’s optical tempo but also evokes the particular corporeal being behind its creation.
The slight unevenness of Scott’s stripes becomes more pronounced in Oxoa’s paintings. Five are included in the exhibition, and the larger three canvases are the most successful for lending painterly nuances greater clarity. In these works, regular horizontal black and white lines take the form of triangles. Another pair of loosely triangular forms, filled with organic patterning, fill the remainder of the canvas. Those latter shapes seem at once to press into the canvas from its outer edges and to ripple outward from the canvas’s center. Such interplay between interior and exterior space is in keeping with the artist’s interest in the connections between the body and its environments. In one painting, that anthropomorphic reference is made, perhaps too clearly, by way of a central set of eye-like orbs. The more interesting appeal to the body emerges from the relation of the paintings to one another on the wall. The repetition of rippling or radiating elements conjures radio waves, and together they generate a rhythm suggestive of a distinct voice.
Where Oxoa’s merging forms evoke more elemental forces, Flick reorients the viewer towards the fundamentals of painting. All three of his contributions employ shaped supports, and their irregularities are echoed internally by complex arrangements of hard-edged acrylic colors. The turn to shaped canvases and an exploration of color surely owes something to the work of painters like Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella, but Josef Albers seems the more critical touchstone. Albers delighted in how neighboring colors inflect one another—chromatically, spatially, and otherwise—and saw attention to and investigations of such interactions as a means of sharpening perceptual powers. In a painting like 23-085 (2023), a standout in the show, we receive just that kind of perceptual training as we notice, say, that the lower left corner of the green form reads as behind the blue while the right side reads as atop the red.
As that description suggests, there is also an implicit tactility at stake. Not only do Flick’s shaped canvases emphasize painting’s material thingness, but they also structure his work’s spatial operations. In the case of 23-085, the canvas’s dynamic asymmetries set in motion an imagination of the internal color-forms being physically manipulated or shuffled in pursuit of new chromatic combinations. A seeing, feeling body is once more at work.
What surprised me most in the exhibition was the ease with which the assembled works coexist. That the Flick and Scott, for instance, can share space without sparking perceptual overload speaks to the internal coherence of their systems and a related sense of calibrated containment. That containment, in turn, directs attention beyond the works’ organizing principles to the discrete conditions of their creation. It is as if an awareness of those distinct animating forces activates the space between the works—interrupting any impulse to merely scroll through the exhibition. All systems go.