This week I caught an early glimpse of the Denzil Hurley painting show opening at Francine Seders on Sunday (the reception is 2-4 pm), and it’s a gathering of sophisticated oils on canvas that are quietly obsessed with the lost action of their own making. Hurley, a UW professor, repeatedly paints in layers, then sands down the paint, producing fields of inflected color that contain mysterious marks. Some of the marks appear to emerge from behind the fields of color, while others lay on top. The field keeps shifting, and so does the desire to look at the marks versus the field. It’s hard to take these in all at once, to reconcile the attraction of the details with the rhythm of the overall picture. I didn’t have enough time with them to decide whether the activity they generate overcomes the dry, methodical approach, but go and see for yourself.

FYI, this is Hurley’s first showing at the veteran gallery (which represents several abstractionists, including Lauri Chambers and Michael Dailey), and it’s titled Variant/Glyphic/Negation/Redact.