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By DAVID COHEN
May 17, 2007

When it comes to painting, evoking the elements calls for elemental solutions. In three beautiful exhibitions in Chelsea right now, contemporary artists balance a fascination with water, clouds, and ethereal, billowing forms with audacious experimental attitudes toward traditional materials. Each body of work manifests a heightened consciousness of paint’s formal properties that are appropriate to what it is depicting, in terms of liquidity or brittleness, fluency or arrest.

Another point in common between Christopher Cook, showing at Mary Ryan Gallery, fellow Englishman Richard Ballard at Robert Steele Gallery, and Jiha Moon at Moti Hasson Gallery, is that they all work on paper mounted to another support (such as canvas or aluminum) and presented unglazed. This affords lively, intriguing surfaces that subtly absorb the gaze as if it were another medium.

In his second exhibition at Mary Ryan, Mr. Cook continues his explorations in liquid graphite. By making his own paint out of a material most commonly found in the lead pencil, Mr. Cook makes a philosophical point about drawing and painting, breaking down dichotomies of sharp definition and blurry form associated with each.

The absence of chroma and the documentary associations that his gray images evoke create cool distance. An occasionally solarized look — of deliberately overexposed, washed-out images — reinforces a photographic connection. Much of the imagery and its related effects seem dictated by tolerated studio accidents, such as drips or smudges. But the artist’s hand is far from absent, with gesture counterbalancing chance. The sense of imagery wiped out of recently wet paint pushed around a resistant surface makes the artist’s hand seem imminent.

Mr. Cook’s new show picks up the images of empty theatres and proscenium arches of the last, and melds them with a new motif, the waterfall: The title of “Curtain Fall” (all 2006) acknowledges this thematic overlap. “Blank” is a rigorously simple composition, with a sweep of the brush along its horizontal base denoting a stage, with little flecks for footlights, and a darker pair of curtains pulling aside to expose the blank screen of the title, which might be a fire or a projection screen or a veil. Or, it could be that we are looking into the auditorium, placing us ostage.

Mr. Cook’s moody theaters recall the alienated quietude of Luc Tuymans’s ballrooms and the voyeuristic aloofness of Walter Sickert’s music halls. Smudge inevitably brings Gerhard Richter to mind, but somehow the vacuity in Mr. Cook seems less political and more poetic. In his images of waterfalls, liquidity and gesture are both more lively than in comparable works by the German artist. Generally, in Mr. Cook’s work, brushstrokes clean away rather than accrete, making his process akin to monotype. But another medium also comes to mind: Looking at the wall of water, the paint seems to shimmer, as if you were looking at a hologram.

“Single Plunge” is the most enigmatic image in the show. It is only in context that it becomes legible as a waterfall. At the center of the composition is a thick brushstroke that bottoms out into an exploding ball. It seems to cast shadows below and to its left. For as long as you stare at it, you cannot work out if it was painted with bravura or deliberation.

Mr. Cook is also showing a DVD, the first he has included in an exhibition: “Journey” (27 minutes) charts a slow-motion nighttime bus journey through the British countryside. This meditatively somber film, with its vaguely chantlike drawn-out sounds, captures the vagaries of forms caught swooshing past windows thatalso reflect movements inside the vehicle. Its grainy texture and ambiguous sense of speed complement the grubby liquefaction of Mr. Cook’s graphite.

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Paris-based Mr. Ballard shows a series of watercolors whose size and scale belie any received connotations of intimacy in that medium. He has two themes running here, which form a strident contrast of hard and soft: electricity pylons and clouds.The pylons (once a favored motif of Mr. Cook’s, as it happens) read almost like Constructivist abstractions. They get inside the structures and present their elements against pink skies. In some, there is a sense of rust bleeding into the page, a further abstraction from the heightened photorealism of the clouds.

Although worked from drawings and photographs, however, the cloud compositions are as much invented as the pylons — improvised in the studio rather than directly observed. There are all kinds here, with different weathers and times of day evoked. The viewer gets the feeling of being up in the clouds, with a strange mix of proximity and endless recession.

The picture planes have a similarly strange mix of opaqueness and transparency. The imagery is literal and credible, but there is also a tangible sensation of pigments suspended on a soft, inviting surface.

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In contrast to the enigma and quietude of Messrs. Cook and Ballard, Ms. Moon goes for the jugular in exhilaratingly complex, brightly hued fantasy evocations of waves and clouds. This is the debut solo exhibition of the young Korean-born artist who is based in Atlanta, Ga.

Her paintings are staged collisions, both literally and culturally. A typical work is a bright cacophony, meticulously orchestrated to keep billowy forms and textures distinct. The associations are high and low, east and west, looking with equal and random enthusiasm to Pan-Asian animé effects, Old Master drawing techniques, and psychedelic pop abstraction.

“Scholar’s Garden” (2007) describes a lovingly complex imaginary space in which credible perspective and ornamental flatness are fused and confused. There are deliciously jarring greens for distant and proximate verdure. Viscous, coagulating acrylic sits upon ethereal, subdued ink washes, evoking disparate senses of scale.

The smaller works are better resolved, generally, than the larger ones, and in one or two instances the use of decals seems forced and predictable. But by and large this is a debut that trumpets technical accomplishment and formal ambition. It is hard to say what, if anything, these mad landscapes mean, but they are rich and fun, inviting exploration.

Cook until June 16 (527 W. 26th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-397-0669); Ballard until June 16 (511 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-243-0165); Moon until June 16 (535 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-268-4444).