They are staggering
because they move back the invention of abstraction from circa 1910, when Kandinsky was said to have set art on a new path with his first «non-representative» paintings, to 1861, when Houghton produced The Holy Trinity, a dark crisscrossing of red and blue lines up and
down the paper that then go left to right, then
down again in twists and spirals, and up once more in energetic
slashes, a working and reworking of energy fields so layered and physical that it can accurately be described as action painting.