Jason Gubbiotti at Hemphill

Jason Gubbiotti has finally arrived.

For the better part of the last decade, Washington has waited for Gubbiotti to emerge as Our Next Abstract Painter, the next in the Morris Louis-Gene Davis line of Washington abstractionists. And while Gubbiotti's potential has long been evident (he was included, for example, in Helen Molesworth's 2005-06 Landscape Confection show), at times his work has shown the burden of expectation. His last show, in 2005 at DC's now-defunct Fusebox, was a jumbled confusion of ideas, paint and woodworking glue. But now, after leaving Washington for marriage and a home in Europe, Gubbiotti has arrived with a superb show at DC's Hemphill Fine Arts. It establishes Gubbiotti as a painter to watch, a leading synthesizer of recent abstract painting. (Gubbiotti's recent success is probably a product of not seeing or talking with me in some time. Before April our last interaction was probably over two years ago.)

Gubbiotti's work takes as its starting point the big three of '80s and '90s New York abstract painting: Jonathan Lasker, Tom Nozkowski, and David Reed. As in Lasker or Reed, Gubbiotti's paintings appear to be carefully planned. If there's a single spontaneous brushstroke on any object at Hemphill, I couldn't find it. Like Nozkowski, Gubbiotti builds forms that seem both dystopian and organic. Gubbiotti also riffs on hard-edge painting, borrowing from Ellsworth Kelly and his loud palette, but also from John McLaughlin's geometric forms.

Gubbiotti also seems to have mixed in a pop culture reference or two, especially the landmark 1980s arcade game "Asteroids." Islands, asteroids, or whatever they are seem to be floating through his paintings. Maybe Gubbiotti's shapes simply remind me of the hours I spent in front of Ataris in the 1980s. But I think there's a little more to the floating effect here than that: At least some of it is because of the clever way Gubbiotti builds his work. All but one of the paintings here are on wood, and instead of squaring all four corners and all four sides, Gubbiotti regularly leaves the top edge or the bottom edge of his panels curved. He paints right up to the curve, not over it, providing the illusion that the painted surface is moving up or down the surface. Lasker, Reed, Nozkowski, Kelly and such firmly anchor their paintings to the canvas and push them right up against the picture plane. Gubbiotti does all that too, but has introduced two-dimensional movement into his paintings. The result is something new and gripping, something that borrows the movement of a good Bonnard or the strange wavy gravy sensation of op art (minus the headache).

The sense of movement across Gubbiotti's paintings is heightened not just by how he shaves his panels but by how he constructs them. In the first decade or so of Gubbiotti's career he appeared to be more interested in building three-dimensional stretchers and supports. The result was objects that were more built than painted, paintings where the act of painting was secondary to the building of a baroque stretcher. Gubbiotti has resolved that issue: His painted surfaces now work in concert with his (toned-down) structures.

The most obvious example is a two-painting work titled Youth Gone Wild (One Minute of Silence) (pictured above). Gubbiotti has installed the two panels facing each other, on opposite walls. One is hung traditionally, flat against a wall. The other is hung right up against the edge of a corner -- and 'moves' around the corner. The effect is hard-edge sublime: that 'floating asteroids' sensation.

Gubbiotti's earlier work also seemed confused about color. No more. Here his colors play well together: They may challenge each other, but the truce between them is no longer shaky. Yellow, green, white, fuschia, red, and orange somehow co-exist. On one canvas. In harmony.

Sure, there are problems here and there. Folk Biology and The Return of Oxytocin, the only painting on canvas, is a jumbled clunker that recalls patio tile. And Is This What Happiness Looks Like? is too much the love child of Kelly and Judd. They're the exceptions that prove the success of the show: Gubbiotti has made paintings that acknowledge the history of abstract painting while adding something to it. The etymology behind his vocabulary is clear and Gubbiotti is making new words.