At first this seems like a familiar world: Brown’s visual vocabulary of abbreviated lines, geometric shapes (mostly rectangles and squares, with the occasional irregular form), and planes of solid colors derives from the lexicon that was established a century ago by the pioneers of modernist abstraction. As you look more closely at single paintings, however, their eccentricities and sly sense of visual humor begins to emerge. These are not, you soon realize, paintings that could have issued out of high modernism. They belong, rather, to that “other tradition” of abstraction that includes figures such as Forest Best, Myron Stout and Paul Feeley; at times, they also evoke vernacular American quilting, in particular to the quilts of Gee’s Bend. But perhaps the best way to understand Brown’s work historically is to consider it in relation to the resurgence of abstract painting that occurred in New York in the 1980s in the work of artists such as Thomas Nozkowski, Jonathan Lasker and Mary Heilmann. Like them, Brown, whose brand of geometry is distinctly handmade, is more interested in the syntactical interplay of forms than in arriving at any repeatable iconic motif. He also shares their belief in the great potential of post-heroic, post-reductivist abstraction. Declining any hint of expressionist drama, Brown prefers to let each painting stand as an autonomous visual event rather than as an emissary of the artist’s ego.

Such a stance is only possible, of course, if the artist can draw on a wealth of stimulating ideas—Brown seems to have an endless store of them. (It could be that he makes small-scale paintings, at least in part, to keep up with his flow of inspiration, with all the paintings that want to get made.) How things touch each other, or don’t, is a crucial aspect of his art. Look, for instance, at Red and Blue Rectangles (all works 2014), a 10-by-8-inch canvas in which the rectangles of the title share the picture plane with an irregular black shape. For me the most important element of the composition is where a point of the black form grazes the red rectangle in what could be a nudge or a kiss.

Misalignment is another of Brown’s favored ploys, as in works such as Anchor Blocks or Little Vienna where blocks of color are arrayed in unregimented stacks and rows. In Broken Yellow Line, the linear break is simultaneously pictorial and physical as a yellow vertical is split between two separate canvases. A similar situation occurs in So, an oil on paper. Looking at So I wonder: maybe these lines haven’t been “broken” so much as they have barely failed to meet and I’m suddenly plunged into psychological speculation. Sometimes an additional presence is required for fusion, as we see in Connect where a short yellow bar bridges the gap between a broken gray vertical. A fine colorist, Brown is equally a master of grisaille, frequently building paintings from subtle shifts of grays. Many of his compositions suggest that he is fascinated by how lines travel from one edge to another. In two related works, Fit and The Sunken Cathedral, he takes a simple idea—drawing a line from edge to edge with a single small loop—and then uses his distinctive gift for surprising juxtapositions of color to achieve a sensual conundrum of figure/ground confusion.

As 2015 progresses, Brown has begun to experiment with thicker supports, which means that the edges of the paintings have taken on increased prominence as painted shapes wrap around the sides of the stretched canvases. This immediately brings a host of new complexities, foremost among them the necessity of viewing the painting not solely as a frontal image, but also from oblique angles. And given the irregular compositions of the paintings, the left and right edges are rarely similar. In order to see the entire painting you have to traverse the space in front of it, and even then you may not be able to see the top and bottom, which have also been painted in specific ways.

More often than not, photography fails to convey the experience of looking at a painting. One of the many welcome effects of Brown’s new works is to remind us of this fact. Actually, the paintings aren’t even fully available to us as we stand before them: every time a viewer moves to one side or another, an important part of the painting disappears from view, to say nothing of the less accessible top and bottom edges. Plus, the colors undergo subtle changes when they wrap around an edge, taking on darker or lighter hues, depending on the light source. The world is in motion, Brown’s paintings are telling us—we are in motion—a static painting is a contradiction in terms.