The improvisational representation in Belzer’s paintings of magnitude in the color plates above is illusionist but breezily so. It is both indebted to the structural and mechanical planning of the structures it alludes to and contrapuntal in its noncompliant abstract precision, getting it right (right enough) while standing apart in artistic freedom. The chief emphasis of the paintings is on their own step by step marking, on a making in which each mark is an answer to the mark behind it and a question to be answered by the next. The paintings wonder at but are also wounded with wonder by monumental industrial space. Their objections are choked back. They use the bold sights to conjure strong warp-angled spaces of their own. Oh to be a painter like Judith Belzer and invent space.
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