Galleries: Abstract paintings offering hints of a realistic past

A few years ago, you likely would have thought of Dean Dass as a representational painter and printmaker, an artist whose images of faded country landscapes and collages of birds spoke of memory and the past. Dass hasn't made a complete about-face since then, but his new paintings at Schmidt Dean Gallery are entirely abstract.

There is a connection between the earlier and recent work that astute followers of Dass will recognize - a certain unearthly, meditative quality that could be seen in the soft-focus cloudiness of a landscape such as Brandywine, which Dass painted in 2003, and now is apparent in the pools of limpid, transparent color that he paints (and seemingly also drips) onto Gampi paper.

In each of his new works, all of which have names such as Large Pink Cloud or Spreading Blue Cloud, Dass has painted a pink, orange-pink, or blue shape with tentacle- or riblike protrusions in an atmospheric field of overcast-sky color. The paintings are romantic and also vaguely humorous in a way that Dass clearly intends.

While his earlier work seemed somewhat influenced by Thomas Chimes, his new paintings look like the best possible step forward into the unknown.

Joan Wadleigh Curran has always drawn beautifully; now her paintings are catching up.

In Curran's latest one-person exhibition at Seraphin Gallery, her paintings are less tentative than they used to be, and her color, previously forlorn, has become warmer and bolder. Her images of nature living within urban decay now seem almost celebratory.

Several of Curran's new paintings also depict recognizable scenes, rather than glimpses of man-made object and nature circling each other in a metaphoric standoff. This time around, nature, previously shown pushing for dominion, seems to have the upper hand. Rehabilitation - Juniata's Garden is not the carefully composed picture Curran used to make; in it, various cacti and succulents create their own imperfect, extravagant composition. The only man-made objects - an orange plastic milk crate, a hose, and some stacks of pots - are relegated to the ground and background of this scene. Two large paintings of fenced areas, Protection (2010) and Trapped (2007), show no nature to speak of, only the failure of the man-made barrier.

Debris (2009), one of the few paintings here that does not depict a scene, is a still life of milkweed pods, sticks, and cactus branches encircled by a rope that recalls Northern European vanitas paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Curran's charcoal drawings and gouache paintings on paper are as exquisitely delicate as ever.

The last time I saw Sebastien Leclercq's work, in Arcadia University's 2009 "Works on Paper" show, I understood its conceptual roots but was not captivated by it.

This time, on its own in his one-person show, "Supposedly," at Rebekah Templeton Contemporary Art, I could appreciate its subtleties.

Leclercq's framed drawings of single lines creep around the gallery, growing sequentially into more lines and eventually into grids of lines, and ending, boom, in a pile of drawings with broken frames next to a window. It's as if the drawings acquired a life force (as we wish some drawings would, in fact, do).

Don't forget to look at Leclercq's black-tape "drawing" on the exterior of the gallery, which follows the arrangement of the mortar between the gray stones, then ends in a handshake.