Sean Vale
Gallery 110, 624-9336.
Through April 27.

Merrill Wagner
William Traver Gallery, 587-6501.
Through April 28.

The ideas that make contemporary art thrilling can also be exhausting, and when I am in need of a little visual relief from all the concept-driven work, from the obsessions and the gazillions of narratives being born every minute, I spend some time with minimalist art.

In looking at it, I am liable to rely on the object, on the visual rather than the philosophical (contemporary art is primarily about the mind). Which is not to say that minimalism in itself can't be conceptual, obsessive, or even narrative (in an infinitely empty way); but where other kinds of work stress movement toward, minimalism suggests stillness, a stopping, the product of a cool and orderly mind.

This is the historical problem of minimalism as proposed in the '60s by artists such as Judd and Kelly and Martin, as a reaction to the emotional excesses of Abstract Expressionism. The blank slate (as a movement, anyway) seems finite. "Movement," in this sense, hardly seems to be the right word; it's difficult to imagine where minimalism can go, or if it wants to go anywhere at all. But the problem for younger artists attracted to this strict brand of formalism is that much of the most reductive work has already been done; what, if anything, differentiates the new minimalism from the old?

Take Robert Ryman's white paintings, for example, in all their different iterations, with degrees of exposed canvas and paint globs, and the artist's signature forming most of what could be deemed content, sometimes taking up half the painting's surface. (Never mind that this wasn't monochromatic painting's first appearance, or that Kasimir Malevich was making them as far back as the early 20th century.) Ryman's works feel like the end of a line, being, as they are, paintings both finished and never-started.

I've been attracted to Sean Vale's work for some time, since I watched content (or perhaps "content") drift out his work, hover nearby from it (in his 1999 show at ArtSpace, with balsa-wood airplanes suspended a few feet away from each painting), and then disappear altogether (in his white-square installations of the last two years). Vale comes to white paintings 40 years after Ryman, and the work is remarkably different--Vale's are actually "painted constructions," more akin to sculpture than painting--but the context feels familiar. Where 1960s minimalism reduced the sound and fury of Ab Ex to cool squares of metal and canvas, Vale's subtly varied panels react to the contemporary surfeit of content by mostly shooing it away. I like to imagine his work hanging around in Times Square, giving people a place to rest their eyes.

But there's more to it. Vale's past installations hinted at white noise, at erasure rather than emptiness, repression rather than blankness. The differences between each white construction resonate like a guitar string plucked in an empty room: a faint grid drawn where you're not likely to see it (the sides, the bottom), or a puckering of paint in a corner like a smattering of organic growth. His new drawings have foxed edges, bits of fabric, mysterious bleachy spots. His work, then, is less of a reaction than an alternative, full of information if you take the time to look for it.

Merrill Wagner, who is, incidentally, married to Ryman, has made works in the past that are quite minimal indeed: a slab of marble against a slab of granite, with a faint graphite mark traced across it. These elegant older pieces are paired with her new works, which approach the energy of Ab Ex, but are still essentially minimal in spirit. They are large panels of slate on which stray marks of oil pastel and graphite accumulate into fields of deliberate opacity, which feels like an extreme liberation from the usual dense, layered work that pastels are usually made to do. The old work and the new show varying levels at which the artist may "interfere" with the materials--minimalism seems to require the artist, as it is commonly said, to "get out of the way"--but still respect their essential qualities. The increments between these two poles make the mind reel.

So much for my visual vacation.