Certainly, 9/11 rattled Stephen Ellis, a painter best known for sleek, process-oriented abstractions, stunningly contrived arrangements of stripes and grids. Mr. Ellis reacted by superimposing on these familiar arrays of architectural scaffolding handwritten fragments of poems by Yeats, Philip Levine, Randall Jarrell and others. The unmistakable suggestion was that paint alone was incapable of addressing history. Mr. Ellis’ faith in the visual had been shaken to the point of despondency. His aesthetic and moral confusion was genuine, yet it couldn’t save the paintings from pretentious contradictions.

Mr. Ellis’ new paintings, on display at Von Lintel Gallery, are confused as well, but their confusion has less to do with addressing history than with trying to regain equilibrium. Words are nowhere in evidence. Instead, expansive fields of sunny tones predominate, at times applied with broad slurs of washy paint. Immaculately taped grids establish a foundation but do not dictate the ultimate structure of the paintings. Mr. Ellis’ chilly embrace of illusionism—he manipulates oils to achieve cinematic effects—is offset by a newfound sense of composition. Space has become less codified and is, at times, rambunctiously open. Mr. Ellis is traveling through unknown terrain—he’s testing his own limits. In that way, the pictures are brave.

But they’re also wobbly. Mr. Ellis is far too controlling a painter to out-and-out play. The renewed awareness of pictorial investigation is stymied by a niggling uncertainty. Each of the canvases is transitional in nature. They’re at odds with themselves, but the conflicting impulses dissipate rather than elicit tension. The paintings hanker for cohesion; they never achieve it. A smallish canvas in the back gallery, a taut arrangement of fiery trails of paint, hints that color may be the key to focusing Mr. Ellis’ energies. I’ll await Mr. Ellis’ next show with keen interest, as should anyone with an abiding regard for painting and a concern for history’s impact on it.

Stephen Ellis is at Von Lintel Gallery, 555 West 25th Street, until April 29.

Collected Unconscious

Who’s responsible for inventorying the output of the American painter Hans Hofmann (1880-1966)? Talk about job security: The backlog of pictures must be endless. Hofmann was unapologetically prolific. Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art could probably mount shows dedicated to this or that aspect of his art from now to kingdom come and not repeat itself. Hofmann’s aesthetic, after all, devoured everything in its path.

“The unabashed unconscious” (the title of the current show) is as good a peg as any: The exhibition has less to do with Freudian theory or creaky dreams than with the irrepressible generosity of a hugely fallible painter. Hofmann didn’t have the constitution or the inclination to muck about in the deepest recesses of t­­he psyche. Life was too short—and too good!—for wasting time on such things. Cheerful recklessness, he reckoned, is preferable to brooding introspection. That’s a rule that may not be universally applicable. Hofmann’s gift is that in the short time we stand in front of the canvases, he makes the truth of that precept shine for all of us.

Hans Hofmann: The Unabashed Unconscious is at Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art, 20 West 57th Street, until April 29.

King of Comedy

William King welcomes you to Alexandre Gallery, which is exhibiting his recent terracotta sculptures, with a Bronx cheer. It’s an inauspicious greeting, but you won’t mind. Étude (2003) is a blackened, nubbly portrait bust that is equal parts Easter Island totem, Dubuffet grotesque and Zippy the Pinhead. The figure exudes an Eastern calm in its acceptance of things as they are—the heavy eyelids betoken satori like few things I’ve seen. The raspberry offered by the gargoyle-like personage is aimed less at the viewer than at the cosmos at large. We should all meet fate with such impish equanimity.

The modest sampling of Mr. King’s sculptures seen in the foyer and front gallery at Alexandre is somewhat diminished by its second-banana status. The main event is an array of works-on-paper by Loren MacIver, pieces whose charm struggles to match Mr. King’s penetrating comedy of manners. And penetrate he surely does. Even when throwing away studies of mood and type, as in a series of small wall reliefs, Mr. King probes the intricacies of the human character with wit, ease and a gentle impropriety. Alexandre promises an overview of his early sculptures this December. In the meantime, Mr. King’s homages to dental hygiene, getting old and “my bitch” will do just fine.

William King: New Terracottas is at Alexandre Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, until May 6.

The dozen paintings at Fischbach, most of which date from the mid-1970's, were painted near Ms. Dodd's cottage in Cushing, Me. Most of the canvases are predicated on an emphatic verticality, primarily in the reach and thrust of trees, which is offset by the sharp, spiky juttings of their branches. Suffused with a clarifying light, the pictures lead the viewer into them with a magnetic persistence. Yet this pull is thwarted just as adamantly by a pictorial space that elbows its way forward to the surface of the painting. In the painting Maine Woods, Small (1974) the clearing in the distance marshals the back-and-forth syncopation of a group of trees in the foreground. We become aware, and pleasurably so, of how Ms. Dodd has pressurized her imagery and fitted each composition within the boundaries of the canvas.

The rigor of Ms. Dodd's vision is indebted to the Spartan art of Piet Mondrian and, in her facture, the paintings of Paul Cézanne. With brushwork that is impassive and to the point, the pictures evince a keen eye for synthesizing complicated information. Her to-the-bones sobriety risks a certain dryness–Ms. Dodd makes a sobersides like Edward Hopper seem cuddly–but this is only a liability in terms of the artist's palette, which tends toward a flat uniformity. Even then, one could not imagine (or want) Ms. Dodd jazzing up her colors. To do so, one feels, would disrupt the laconic equilibrium of her art.

When looking at the paintings, we're never less than confident that we are standing on solid ground. Nature, for Ms. Dodd, isn't a jumping-off point–an arbitrary motif upon which she suspends her pictorial concerns–but a deep-seated commitment. It is significant, I think, that the human presence makes itself felt in the images, to the extent that it is felt at all, by objects: a pitchfork or a chair or the back of a canvas. Her landscapes are less locales we traverse than domains to which we have been granted an audience. Her trees, in particular, have an intractable self-awareness–as if they were harboring their own preternatural secrets. Untouched by romance, Ms. Dodd's woods are accorded a modicum of privacy and a maximum of deference. What strange, wonderful paintings they are. Lois Dodd; The Woods: Selected Paintings from the 1970's is on view at Fischbach Gallery, 24 West 57th Street, until March 11.

Ellis Pushes His Art, With a Taping Knife

Stephen Ellis' abstractions, currently on view at Von Lintel & Nusser, are hard-edged and streamlined. With their overlapping geometries and layerings of oil and alkyd paint, the pictures have a step-by-step unflappability. Mr. Ellis paints with a taping knife, the kind routinely used for plastering walls, and utilizes it both as an additive implement and a subtractive one. He's capable of skimming paint into planks of immaculate density or scraping areas of paint away, resulting in grainy surfaces that reveal–always effectively, often glibly and sometimes evocatively–prior states of each composition.

What makes these efforts Mr. Ellis' most interesting to date is that process is no longer its own expertly tooled reward. The artist is beginning to enliven his all-over compositions with specific relations of form. Each canvas begins as a gridlike scaffolding which is then accentuated by decisive overlays of incident: rectangles, stripes or flaglike blocks of pattern. These geometric hubs are tethered to the painting's infrastructure while staking their claim to independence.

By locating an irregularity contingent upon repetition, Mr. Ellis is pushing his art in a way that generates real excitement. Well, some excitement anyway: When he introduces slippery, ersatz brushstrokes or squeegeed blurs into his grids, he's just another post-painterly technician banking on affectation and theory to get his pictures by. (That the mimicking of photographic effects with oil paint is an ironic comment on pictorial cliché hasn't prevented it from becoming a cliché of its own–and a peculiarly arch one at that.) Yet these paintings show Mr. Ellis turning away, tentatively but with interest, from the sleek reassurances of facility to the entanglements of a more open-ended art.

Mr. Ellis' best painting is a horizontal canvas–all of them are untitled–divided into four vertical sections. Within these columns, regimented stripings of deep blue set up a cinematic field of rhythm punctuated by lustrous rectangles of white. Traversing the upper portion of the canvas is a band of alternating yellows that serves as an abrupt counterpoint of color, temperature and tempo to the painting's underlying framework. Here Mr. Ellis constructs an almost architectural space, endowing the painting with a magnitude that is new and welcome to the work. If the rest of the paintings are thin or irresolute in comparison, they nonetheless display an artist who is learning to follow and focus his curiosity. Stephen Ellis is on view at Von Lintel & Nusser, 555 West 25th Street, until March 18.