Kate Butler reviews Joseph Ablow: Qualities of Stillness recently on view at Boston University's Stone Gallery.

Butler observes that in Ablow's paintings: “We see … tables—as well as cups, pitchers, bowls and the occasional napkin or wrench—animated with the intimacy and loneliness, the attraction and repulsion, of the human beings who are absent from their world… The self-conscious solitude of Ablow’s objects is a predicament that his paintings never quite lose touch with, even as correspondences of color aspire to unite them. Indeed, solitude the defining reality of the worlds on which their dramas take place—these worlds being, without exception, tables. Whether treated as a stage for a drama of kitchenware or as subjects in their own right, the tables dictate the distortions and distances of space that define each composition."