Roberta Smith reviews Through the Valley: New Paintings by Devin Powers at Lesley Heller Workspace, New York, on view through February 1, 2015.

Smith writes that Power's paintings "muster an elaborate physicality while corralling a profusion of references to different cultures, mediums and artifacts within their irregular borders. They might more logically be called painted reliefs, but they confuse matters by being so clearly derived from a single surface on which a mongrel process of drawing, painting and chiseling has run a bit rampant. And nothing is quite as rampant as the unhinged geometric patterns, defined first by automatist drawing and then by divots painted with contrasting colors, which give the best works a writhing, billowing energy."