So says Jen Graves in her review of Simmons’s show up now at Greg Kucera Gallery.

Let’s begin by clearing up one fact: Jeffrey Simmons’s paintings are, in fact, paintings made by Jeffrey Simmons. This is true in the most traditional possible sense. He uses paintbrushes, on canvas. Laboriously, he layers acrylic paint on and sands it down. That’s how they’re made.

It’s necessary to make this point because people endlessly mistake these paintings for photographs. People also mistake them for images powered by electric light, plugged in, lit from behind, illuminated by some secret source besides paint. The people making these mistakes are only getting halfway there. The paintings do look like photographs in light boxes at first; it’s the fact that they’re not that sends the mind spinning. In order to get the full cognitive dissonance, you need the mistake and the fact, the illusion and the truth.

Simmons is a Seattle artist whose name you ought to know; he has been making interesting paintings since 1996…

The rest of the piece—a wonderful piece of criticism—is here.