Look, for instance, at the 50 x 40 alkyd, oil, and wax piece, breathe: its deep mineral aquamarine lit by yellow, coursing with undercurrents of green, dappled with bits of icy cyan, and marked by a mysterious dark blue-black form which bleeds a bit of red. Can you feel it? That ice-edged ache, so alive within the painting, slowly takes up residence in the body as you look. As you sink into these paintings—they, in turn, sink into you.

It doesn’t take long for the viewer to see that the works included in Evanescence are palimpsests, a chronicle written in color and texture that adds more than just depth, but history. This matches with Walding’s process—not only does he work using a painstaking process of applying paint, removing it, reapplying, removing, on and on, layer by layer—but these paintings are often created over the course of multiple years. What is not there, what has vanished or been erased, somehow becomes in the final viewing, almost as important as what remains. Walding’s act of using the edge of a painting knife to draw into multiple layers of paint, making lines and shapes that reveal contrasts and striking juxtapositions of color, confirms for us something we instinctively know—that there is “more going on here” than can be gleaned from a quick glance.

Perhaps it is partly that persistence of absence in these pieces that contributes to the sense of mystery and loss that seems to haunt them. Evanescence is more than just the name of the series—it quite aptly hints at the deeper resonance these pieces emit. While in modern advertising language evanescence may be used to talk about bubbly drinks (from its tangential connection to vapor)—at its core, the noun is about the process of gradually disappearing: to vanish, to disappear, to be forgotten. Add to this the understanding that Walding was quite directly inspired in these works by images of melting Antarctic ice and the picture begins to clear.

This isn’t to say that these are paintings of ice. They’re not. A piece like evanescent or breach with their pale blues frosted by white, edged by pale algae-bloom green, or lined sharply by reds or oranges is not depiction but gesture—they feel more like memory and strike deeper. They owe at least as much to the delicate and mysterious paintings of 13th-century Chan Buddhist monk, Muqi Fachang as they do to drone images of glaciers.

Ultimately, what strikes the viewer so acutely, is that the works of Evanescence are beautiful. This isn’t the beauty of advertisements or easy expectations but of vastness, of awe in its oldest sense (a reverence mixed with fear). It is the feeling that comes with acknowledging the transience of life, of things, of the planet itself. This kind of beauty reminds us that life is fragile and staggeringly complex. These paintings are beautiful because of the way that that blue pool of reflected light polling under the breastbone tickles and troubles us. The paintings of Evanescence have a gravity that supports, allowing us to look, see, and to remember.

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Sarkisian’s show is one to behold. It’s a techno extravaganza filled with clever one-liners that make you think and often grin but for the most part may not stick with you very long. Of course, the artist’s technical prowess is impressive. The multiple stations of individual pieces must have been a nightmare to install, so kudos to the artist and the museum preparators. Unexpected was the near-total darkness in the galleries and a thermostat setting that rivals the deepest regions of the Carlsbad Caverns. The miserly lighting is to better display the video streams and disguise the necessary mechanics, while the latter presumably saves the multitude of electronics from heat stroke.

Going from the dark, cavelike environs of the museum into the sheer brightness of Jackson’s gallery was a born-again moment—not that I disliked the Sarkisian exhibit; it’s really worth seeing. But I was ready for something not digitized, projected, or synchronized with sound that played to conceptual narratives, which in a few instances felt contrived. I needed something beautiful to look at that touched both the mind and the soul. Walding’s paintings do that and more.

The austere presentation of Walding’s work is striking, typical of Charlotte Jackson’s less-is-more aesthetic, with clean white walls devoid of labels and lots of breathing space between the pieces. It’s an installation strategy that invites a purposeful dialogue with the works and elicits contemplation of more than subject matter. Walding’s work is decidedly nonobjective. Think in terms of formal elements—paint application, color scheme, textural qualities, shapes and forms, symmetry, and composition—along with the artist’s sensitivity to his materials as he develops a visual mapping of these elements onto canvas. Indeed, Walding’s total abstractions speak to a variety of relationships between line, shape, and patterning within textured fields of subtle color that often allude to architectural components, if not an indecipherable coding via the artist’s marks. And therein lies the beauty.

Dark Intervals—a vertically formatted piece executed in oil and cold wax with pencil—is a case in point. Drawn and painted rectangular shapes exist within a darkish field of assorted grays that from a distance appears dense and opaque as well as flat in tonality. Upon closer examination, it becomes apparent that the surface is composed of a delicate layering effect with passages of underpainting peeking through, giving the overall canvas a silky sheen that dances with the light and changes with the viewer’s position. Three painted parallel black bands positioned horizontally to the lower left import a visual equilibrium to the largest and adjoining rectangle to the right, which has attached to its top a construct that could be a stylus balanced on a fulcrum. A small, light blue rectangle nudged against the right edge of the composition is an added focal point that extends Walding’s asymmetrical design, but nothing feels discernibly skewed—all is how it should be.

Compositionally less complex but bolder in voice is Third Rail, a near-square painting at 46 by 43 inches in which Walding again incorporates a large rectangle juxtaposed with three black bands. This time the bands—more prominent in scale than those in Dark Intervals and placed high in the painting in a field of dark gray—overlap a light bluish-gray rectangle to the right that sports a finely drawn black line that extends its vertical length. Similar to Dark Intervals—and, for that matter, the majority of Walding’s body of work for flux—Third Rail has a scumbled surface quality of finely applied expressive marks that soften painted, drawn, and scratched lines that demarcate geometric shapes.

Lookout—the smallest piece in the show at 21.5 by 19 inches—is arguably the most vibrant and the most beautiful painting in the group. Isolated in an alcove, Lookout is painted in the most gorgeous shades of cerulean blues tending toward teal blue—think of the crystal clear, lapping blue waters of a tropical island. The subtle spectrum of Walding’s blues in this and a few other paintings has a calming effect upon the eye and spirit. To quickly pass by these works is to deprive yourself of a moment of silent reverie.

My only quibble with some of Walding’s paintings is that in one or two there exists a tendency to get a bit fussy. For example, the centrally located rectangle—think check box—of Shelter contains a very deliberate “X” that fills its interior, which imparts a static quality to an otherwise dynamic painting. When I stepped back and blocked out the X-ed box with my thumb, the work exuded a marvelous feeling of openness belying its diminutive scale of 24 by 21 inches.

The cohesiveness of Walding’s flux is to be admired. The exhibit clearly conveys a singular vision that is focused on subtle variations of shifting, related colors—blues and grays—along with expressive additive and subtractive processes where occasional schematics of red, rust, and yellow only heighten the aesthetic effect. In short, I got what I came for.

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