Nothing But Space is both the mind-tickling title and the uniting concept of this diverting exhibition of the work of three painters. Its statement/manifesto starts out talking about hyperspace, but concludes with a succinct summation of what these artists truly have in common: a focus on pattern and especially on space as a concept, as it’s addressed in (contemporary) painting. Three person shows can sometimes be a disconcerting experience. Visitors might find themselves wishing for more or less of one of the artist’s work, or find that the fit between one aesthetic and another is less than perfect. This show succeeds in avoiding such pitfalls, offering a varied yet remarkably harmonious viewing experience. This may be due to the somewhat similar palette all three use—or, perhaps, to the fact that Lorenz chose the other two artists with the aforementioned conceptual focus in mind.

Bucheon’s deep, high-ceilinged storefront can comfortably accommodate work of varying scales. Eric Hongisto—who sometimes works directly on walls—painted a brilliant skein of crossing curved lines, varying from thick to thin, across most of the gallery’s rear wall. This interwoven lattice suggests a number of things, from proteins seen under a microscope to an interchange of intergalactic highways seen from far away. Hongisto punctuates the ends of some lines with actual balls of yarn and string, wound in dazzling combinations of color, texture and weight. Attached to the wall invisibly, these spheres seem to float, as if poised for some kind of imaginative action. Even though such palpable physicality seemingly contradicts the invented, two-dimensional space of the painting, these objects are what make the whole composition work. This is demonstrated by Hongisto’s other paintings in the show—smaller works on canvas, sans balls, which are attractive but nowhere near as compelling as the mural-sized wall work. This is partly a matter of scale, I imagine; like most installations, Hongisto’s is large enough for us to immerse ourselves in it. Images of other such works that can be found on the gallery's website support this idea.

Nathan Haenlein’s meticulous gel-pen drawings create a world in which scale is impossible to determine. Each work presents a single form suggestive of architecture, suspended on a field of white. These objects/buildings could be any size—from child’s block to massive monument. To define and describe these mysterious forms, Haenlein uses candy-bright colors, arranged in dizzyingly complicated surface patterns. These pixellated stripes and chevrons slow down the eventual impact of the complicated geometrical shapes they cover. Seen as a group, these begin to look like nightmarish apartment blocks or prisons (or, maybe, space stations in Hongisto’s congested outer space). The solidity of Haenlein’s persuasive forms is deeply convincing, and his use of color and pattern invokes associations ranging from diagrams to computer-generated hallucinations to the work of printmaker Victor Vasarely.

Jeanne Lorenz, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, 2007. Acyriic pigment on canvas, 40"x48"

Jeanne Lorenz gets her images from Ebay. (I have been waiting to write that sentence since I first thought of it while looking at her hypnotizing paintings and prints.) For the works in this show, Lorenz downloaded pictures of kitschy owl sculptures photographed by their sellers perched on dining room tables or shag rugs. These pictures serve as a point of departure for Lorenz, who often dematerializes the owls into patterns reminiscent of the sixties (in the period’s domestic palette of harvest gold, mocha, orange, aqua and avocado), leaving them embedded in their weird domestic backgrounds. Sometimes the owl’s silhouettes become windows into another reality, in which there are more owls… and so on. In many of Lorenz’ works, remnants of the original Ebay image function as evidence of the world from which these images have escaped, but they also push up against the flat space of the patterns in unexpectedly felicitous ways. A smorgasbord of printmaking techniques have been used in a suite of works hung salon-style in the back of the gallery. These pieces’ modest scale allows us to look at them together instead of serially, and think about the nonexistent space of the internet—were these owls ever real?—and about the process of hopeful projection on which Ebay has been able to build its incredible success.

In the end, as the statement for the show puts it, it may be that “there is nothing but space; matter is space curled up into miniscule patterns.” The work of these artists is both a reminder of the intangibility of the things around us and a three-way conversation about the insistent physicality of images of objects and buildings; of balls of yarn, or of canvases covered with painted marks.