John Beech at Charlotte Jackson

Over the course of a 15-year career, John Beech has become known for wittily transforming--or appropriating the shapes of--everyday industrial objects such as car-floor mats, Dumpsters and parking-lot bumpers. This recent show comprised 11 works, mostly made in 2003 and 2004, from the four corners of his repertoire: the interactive "Rotating Paintings" made of wooden and Plexiglas disks affixed to lazy Susan hardware; the "Glue Paintings," in which plywood structures are layered with colored glue; and two series of floor pieces, titled "Obstacles" and "Rolling Platforms."

Though the artist acknowledges the influence of Donald Judd and the Minimalist esthetic, these geometric constructions are easily read as subversive offspring of Minimalism's reductivist vocabulary. Frequently, Beech's clever handcrafted assemblages juxtapose sleek and precisely calibrated surfaces with sections of raw plywood; sometimes he exposes the works' bare backsides. Punctuated with spontaneous spills and splatterings of paint that often run over the edges and supports, these compositions also are a nod to Process art. For instance, Green Cube (2000), a mint-colored wall-hung box with a wide stripe of unpainted wood, incorporates metal pipes that serve as peepholes to allow the viewer to peer into its hollow interior. On the floor below Green Cube sat a mutant cube-shaped mover's dolly in fire-engine red enamel--one of the "Rolling Platforms"--which appeared to sprout the paint-splattered casters screwed to its surfaces.

In contrast, Beech's new additions to the "Glue Paintings" do not have the haphazard air of the earlier pieces; instead, these stark compositions are elegantly sensuous, almost despite themselves. They assume a variety of shapes, their opaque and delicately mottled monochrome surfaces achieved through the use of underpainting and meticulously brushed-on coatings of glue in which pigments have been suspended. (Previously, the "Glue Paintings" featured the "found" colors of particular brands or types of adhesive.) Glue Painting #82, a chunky block that extends out from the wall, has smooth, faintly rippled salmon-colored surfaces. The piece's singular lusciousness is also a product of gravity, which drew the viscous medium downward to form ridges of rounded saw-toothed peaks that subsequently hardened around the bottom edges and across the underside. These configurations, suggestive of water droplets or of frosting on a cake, curiously conjure the pastry displays found in Wayne Thiebaud's paintings.

This emphasis on color and textural nuance in the later "Glue Paintings" obscures their humble origins while imbuing them with a meditative materiality that distinguished them from other pieces in the show. It will be interesting to see if this development in Beech's practice signals an entirely new direction, or if it simply means that he's about to come full circle.