John Yau reviews an exhibition of paintings by Keltie Ferris at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, on view through January 12, 2013.

Yau writes: "Ferris isn’t a purist. She uses pastels, oil paint and acrylic. She applies paint with a palette knife or a spray gun for which she mixes her own colors. She builds up her paintings with thin washes and layers. She is not methodical, leaving some areas uncovered. Looking takes the form of scrutiny -we move around the surface and examine what the artist has done as well as how she did it." He continues: "There is a rather aggressive dance in these works between the optical and the visceral, legibility and illegibility, crisp and blurred, the solid and the atomized — the visual cacophonies of urban life, which I am betting most of us don’t luxuriate in. But that’s exactly what Ferris’s paintings do – they delight in clashes of color and spatial incongruities."