I stopped and craned my neck, puzzled. Having kept Mr. Reed's art at arm's length in the past, I couldn't believe I was actually curious-indeed, eager-to see the work. Could Mr. Reed have discovered a new (or interesting) facet to his hyperstylized brand of abstraction? It seemed unlikely. Here, after all, was a painter whose art I had described as the oil-on-canvas equivalent of a Big Mac, "unfailing and flavorless."

Upon returning to Protetch a few days later, the exhibition now open to the public, my qualms about Mr. Reed's pictures remained pretty much intact. His meticulous investigations of the art of painting still give off a whiff of formaldehyde. The roiling, silky brushstrokes-Mr. Reed's signature mark, now widely imitated-are dramatic, denatured and cinematic. They're emblems of touch, not the real thing, and, as such, self-conscious and mannered.

The work's lustrous surfaces, having been layered, stenciled and sanded, nonetheless maintain a hands-off, disembodied character. Mr. Reed's clever manipulations of oil paint dazzle the eye, the flashy forms creating lurid elisions of color, space and gesture. This is sleek, slick and brainy stuff-fodder custom-made for those who like painting only when it admits to being on its last legs.

Having said that, I was seduced by Mr. Reed's recent efforts-though I don't want to suggest that they evince an infusion of warm blood. The work is as chilly as ever, yet it seems different, more open and exploratory, more complicated in a way that has less to do with pictorial sensation than with pictorial structure. It's to Mr. Reed's credit that he's discovering nuances within a style that had seemed fairly fixed.

The new compositions are geared to building upon, rather than exploiting, jarring juxtapositions of incident-they feel, I don't know … fulsome. And sometimes these fast paintings are slow: In one canvas, an accumulation of yellow is augmented by thalos and purples, creating an elusive range of tones impossible to register in a single viewing. In an odd way, Mr. Reed's canvases have become less statements about painting than merely paintings. That's a heartening step.

Then again, maybe I'm just relieved that Mr. Reed hasn't digitally inserted one of his paintings into an Alfred Hitchcock film or created a mock installation of the room in which the scene took place, as he's done in the past. Maybe the absence of gimmickry, coupled with a hunger for well-crafted contemporary painting, has occasioned a softening of the critical backbone. Mr. Reed's art is, in its immaculate contrivance, pretty off-putting. Then again, if it weren't off-putting, the paintings somehow wouldn't be as alluring as they are. Mr. Reed will never find his way into your heart-but he will finagle his way into your head, using the eye as his conduit.

David Reed is at the Max Protetch Gallery, 511 West 22nd Street, until Dec. 23.

Tinkering Tuttle

The Drawing Center in Soho has mounted an exhibition of drawings and sculptures by Richard Tuttle, and all you need to know about the man can be gleaned from the wall label in the entryway. There, you'll find Mr. Tuttle's name spelled out in wobbly pieces of black vinyl lettering affixed to the wall with ragged bits of foam padding. Rumpled and childlike, abject and offhand, the letters exemplify a sensibility infatuated with its own exquisite indifference.

Sensibility is all there is to Mr. Tuttle's art. His lackadaisical doodles and rickety assemblages made of wood-shop leftovers, chicken wire, metal tubs and glittery styrofoam are tossed off, artfully trivial. No wonder that gossamer webs of praise are spun around the stuff-anything to obscure the fact that there's precious little substance to the things. Instead, we're invited to bask in the radiance of an unfettered and discursive talent. That's why people love the shit out of Mr. Tuttle: Having freed himself from the responsibility of shaping form, he frees the viewer from the responsibility of having to look at art. It's light work, really.

Don't be fooled by Mr. Tuttle's whimsical demeanor. In his own willfully diminutive way, he's as self-aggrandizing as Richard Serra, Sean Scully or Frank Stella-which means, above all else, that Mr. Tuttle is an artist you can live without.

Richard Tuttle: It's a Room for 3 People is at the Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, until Feb. 26.

Psychedelic Imaginings

If you're familiar with the ceramic sculptures of Ken Price-those overrefined glosses on the tradition of biomorphic form-you'll want to check out his drawings at Matthew Marks' shoebox gallery on 21st Street. They're not recommended, mind you, just odd: They depict erupting volcanoes, lightning, the ocean, and blobby, aquatic-like creatures in the company of buxom young women-not-so-distant cousins of Gauguin's Tahitian nudes.

The pictures are reminiscent of underground comics, the animated film Fantastic Planet, and the fervent imaginings that line the margins of a high-school student's notebook. Rendered in a flat-footed, psychedelic style, they pay little attention to the niceties of line or shape. (Color fares a mite better.) The drawings aren't studies for sculptures; they tell us less about Mr. Price's art than Mr. Price the artist. It turns out he's a guy given to rather pedestrian daydreams. Mr. Marks felt that was reason enough to mount an exhibition-depending on your frame of mind, you might grant that he has a point.

Ken Price: Works on Paper is at the Matthew Marks Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, until Dec. 24.

Ms. McEneaney can best be thought of as a cultivated folk artist. In this respect she again resembles Stettheimer, although the sophistication inherent in Ms. McEneaney's paintings is harder to pin down. It's perhaps most evident in her emphasis on the particular. When fine-tuning a picture, she does so out of fidelity to the objects depicted rather than a compulsive need to fill the surface of the canvas. Admittedly, Ms. McEneaney's particulars are often stilted: Her awkwardness with the human form, especially, is painful to behold. Still, the paintings do connect, often through sheer persistence. In the best of them, we see the artist traveling to Manhattan on the New Jersey Transit, looking out the window at Ground Zero in the distance. It's a poignant image, not least because its blend of curiosity, anxiety and incomprehension is so sharply underplayed. Sept. 11 has occasioned a lot of so-called "art"; Ms. McEneaney's picture actually merits the name. Sarah Mc-Eneaney: Flattery Among Others is at Gallery Schlesinger, 24 East 73rd Street, until June 22.

An Architect's Hungry Eye

What I know about architecture could fit on the head of a pin. But I do know that the selection of drawings, paintings and watercolors by Louis I. Kahn (1901-1974), now at the Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, is a summer surprise. Kahn is the influential American architect whose best-known building is probably the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Tex. But don't head up to East 79th Street expecting to see architectural renderings. While architecture does figure in the Salander-O'Reilly show-most notably in Kahn's depictions of the houses, basilicas and convents of Italy-the pieces on view aren't work-related. They're the engaging dabblings of an inspired amateur.

Writing in the catalog, Sue-Ann Kahn states that her father "was never not drawing." His hungry and appreciative eye is in evidence in each piece on view. Whether capturing the withering light of the American landscape or the civilized environs of the Borghese Gardens, Kahn was never less than enthralled with what was before him. The pictures veer from harsh realism to angular expressionism; there are bucolic landscapes that look like they came out of a vintage picture book, and there's even a nifty abstract painting. Kahn's art shakes the earth more than one might initially think. Louis I. Kahn: Drawings, Paintings & Watercolors is at the Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, 20 East 79th Street, until June 28.

Flavorless Product

I'd rather be seduced than suckered, which is why I've always held the paintings of David Reed at arm's length. Mr. Reed's pictures, currently on display at the Max Protetch Gallery, are eye-popping dissertations on the art of painting. His cool and flashy canvases contain snaking brushstrokes, fractured spaces and colors as luminous as they are brittle. Anyone familiar with the properties of oil paint will realize that the cinematic effects Mr. Reed coaxes from that medium require not only time, know-how and patience, but the most systematic of approaches. His fabulously manipulated pictures evince a methodology akin to that of an assembly line-which is, as one might suspect, the problem. Less inspired than efficient, Mr. Reed is a painting machine, one whose expertise guarantees a product as unfailing and flavorless as a Big Mac.

The recent pictures offer more of the same-with one exception. If I'm not mistaken (and after three trips to Protetch, I don't think I am): Painting #483 (2001-2) is his masterpiece. It certainly nags at the eye in a way that the rest of the paintings don't. It hasn't been finessed to death; it reveals its pictorial evolution forthrightly. As a consequence, #483 gains in punchy rhythms, spatial fullness and a metaphoric malleability. For the first time in his career, Mr. Reed's slathered brushstrokes are actors given individuality, sensuality and weight. For an artist who trades in pictorial cliché, that's some achievement. Whether #483 is a happy accident or a harbinger of things to come remains to be seen. With a painter as controlling as Mr. Reed, we should probably content ourselves with the former and cut our losses. David Reed: New Paintings is at Max Protetch, 511 West 22nd Street, until June 15.