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Will Boone at Karma is the Daily Pic by Blake Gopnik

Art ABCs

The Daily Pic: Will Boone uses words to build images.

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(Courtesy Will Boone and Karma, NY)
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Two four-foot-wide paintings from the "Sigils" series by Will Boone, now on view at Karma gallery in New York. One is titled "End" and the other "Oak", and that gives Boone's game away: These almost-abstract pictures are built by superimposing all the letters in each painting's title. The process yields a kind of automatic abstraction, and the ultimate conflation of content and style. The Greenbergians used to ask for at-a-glance legibility, and you could say that Boone delivers on that promise, and defeats it.

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