James Kalm visits the exhibition Fred Valentine Toward Grandfather Mountain at STUDIO 10, Bushwick, Brooklyn, on view through March 8, 2015.

Kalm notes that Valentine's "show presents many small scaled paintings featuring the artist's heavily worked surfaces, and rich warn pallet. There's a sly, mischievous quality to the work due to the artist's knowingly tweaking and manipulation accepted painterly tropes, and genres."